← Recent meetings · September 2026
The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-09-15
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (26,973 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Tue, Sep 15, 2026 · meeting length 2 hr 57 min · council salary-time ≈ $2,273
Council salary-time = 12 councilors × ($133,207/yr ÷ 2,080 hr) × meeting length. Attendance varies and salaries are fixed regardless of meeting count — this contextualizes the council time a session takes; it is not money the meeting "spent."
Session TL;DRAI draft · not editor-reviewed
Key points
- Staff presented a police staffing cost report showing expansion costs could rise to about 38 million dollars a year over a decade.turn 9 in the transcript ↓
- The council discussed a proposed ordinance banning concealed firearms in certain city buildings, added an enforcement amendment, then set the item aside with no return date.turn 143 in the transcript ↓
- A proposed ordinance would raise minimum park exclusion periods for drug and weapon offenses from 30 or 60 days up to 90 days.turn 183 in the transcript ↓
- Members of the public testified that community center workers lack a safety plan for handling drug use or weapons there.turn 214 in the transcript ↓
- Council members questioned whether the city should expand police staffing now or first address why response times have been rising.turn 28 in the transcript ↓
Where the council disagreed
Should the city prioritize understanding and fixing the causes of rising police response times before planning any staffing expansion?
- One positionSome members argued the city should first recalibrate police workload and understand why response times are rising before adding officers.turn 30 in the transcript ↓
- Another positionOthers wanted to move ahead with planning additional investments, including a dedicated overtime budget for police.turn 24 in the transcript ↓
Should the proposed ban on concealed firearms in certain city buildings move forward as written?
- One positionSome members said they were ready to support the ban because government meetings should be safe and welcoming.turn 109 in the transcript ↓
- Another positionOthers said the city should not pass the rule yet, citing concerns about uneven enforcement and unanswered record requests.turn 96 in the transcript ↓
Should the city lengthen park exclusion periods for drug and weapons offenses as proposed?
- One positionSome members said longer exclusions would close a loophole and make the tool more effective against repeat offenders.turn 183 in the transcript ↓
- Another positionOthers opposed the change, saying it would disproportionately affect communities of color and limit their use of parks.turn 185 in the transcript ↓
Roll-call votes from this session date
None published yet. Votes from this session appear in the vote ledger once verified; this summary never states a vote result.
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Procedural markers in this session
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Procedural episode · turns 0–8
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0 Good morning. I call this meeting of the community and public safety committee to order. It is Tuesday, September 15th, 9:30 a.m. The clerk, please call the roll.
1 Good morning. Morillo. Here. Zimmerman here. Smith here. Kanal here.
2 Novick here. Could we hear the statement of conduct?
3 Welcome to the meeting of the community and public safety committee. To testify before this committee. In person or virtually. You must sign up in advance the committee agenda at www.Portland.gov/agenda/communie or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting in person, testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. Public testimony will be taken on an item. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over, the chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying. State your name for the record. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
4 Thank you. We have three items on our agenda today. First is a report back on a resolution councilor Smith sponsored earlier this year to study police officer recruitment goals and the cost of achieving and sustaining increased staffing levels. My apologies to councilor Smith for taking so long to get this on the agenda between the budget, other legislation and staff availability. This has taken too long, but we're excited to discuss it today. Second is a continued discussion of the protecting Portland buildings ordinance that would prohibit the carrying of firearms into certain city buildings by persons who have concealed weapons permits. The sponsor has an amendment. I will be motioning as a courtesy. We'll have the city administrator here to share his perspective. Third, we have a new ordinance from councilor Zimmerman to amend the conduct code for Portland parks with updates to ejection and exclusion criteria. But our first order of business is the approval of the community and public safety committee meeting minutes from July 7th, 2026 through August 4th, 2026. Are there any objections? The approval of the minutes. All right. By unanimous consent, the minutes are approved, I could the clerk read the second item.
5 Item number two, document number 2026-31 for Portland police expansion cost report.
6 Thank you. We have a somewhat lengthy presentation today, but I think that the content warrants it. We're on for 30 minutes. But if you can get through before then that would be great. So take it away.
7 I'm a performance analyst with the public safety service area.
8 Good morning, brian hughes, deputy chief, Portland police bureau.
9 So I'm going to present on the report presented to council pursuant to resolution 42, directing the dca to prepare a report on expanding the cost of expanding the police bureau. The next slide. Just some background. This kind of issue has been looked at in the past. In 2015, there was a staffing study which looked at increasing staff from 924 and 2015 to 951. In 2020. There was an updated study that looked just at patrol officers recommending increasing patrol officers to 399, but those recommendations were never fully implemented at the time. So we took a workload analysis framework. We looked at what work the police bureau is expected to do, how much time it takes, and the level of performance that the city expects from the bureau. We looked at three primary scenarios. One of them, the lowest here, took the period around 2020 as our kind of scenario for most challenging recruitment and retention. The high scenario there looked at a scenario where we have a dramatically improved recruiting and retention situation, and the medium scenario there, we think, is a plausible increase on a glide path that reflects our best recruiting performance over the last few years, sustained over a decade. So the model here of that middle scenario charts out what that would look like. Over about ten years, we see a gradual increase in the number of available non trainee officers, a full trainee docket. And by about 2030 we eliminate our vacant positions and would need reauthorization for increased. And by June 30th 36 we reached the the the full level of our model. So one of the main assumptions here is that a decent proportion of these officers would be assigned to patrol with the goal of reducing response times for priority service. You can see over the past few years, we've had a decline in both the number of dispatch calls for service and an increase in the response times for all categories of of call. The patrol staffing level over the past ten years has been pretty stable at about 330 officers. The decline in officers has not really affected patrol staffing levels. It's been taken from other areas of the bureau. One way that that's been dealt with is an increased reliance on overtime. One of our assumptions in this model is that a decent chunk of new hires would be assigned to reduce overtime. We think that by 2036, we could reduce overtime by approximately two thirds, saving about 13 million a year by reducing personnel backfill overtime and planned mission overtime. There would be about a third of the overtime that would not be able to be removed, which would be emergent situations, warrant service, those kinds of things. The chief's office put together a staff, a sample staffing plan of how we would use this number of officers. I'm not going to go through this in detail. It's in the in the report, but you can see a large chunk of this goes into patrol operations. We envisage a new precinct, but an increase across the board in most areas as well. So when we're looking at the assumptions, all of these numbers are in non inflation adjusted dollars. They use the average current compensation rates for each job classification. They don't include expected increases for future years. The model includes total tax payer burden. Both the general fund and the fpd honor levy. Although those aren't city expenses, they are expenses to the taxpayer that are incurred because of city policy. So we did include them in the model. It includes core costs of salary and benefit staff and immediate costs like training. It does not include capital facilities, non-sworn support staff, recruitment, spending or equipment and vehicle procurement. Beyond initial officer outfitting, we think the recruitment and retention would cost approximately 3.5 million a year in training and onboarding costs, in addition to other costs. So you can see in the first year here, we add about 700,000 in costs, and that increases to a total of about 38 million above current levels by 2036. This is net of overtime savings, but not including the items that that we didn't include. In addition to these items, we think there's about 338 million in capital costs associated with new buildings and vehicle storage. And, you know, places to put hundreds more offices. So in summary, this is what we estimate the costs to be about 700,000 in the first year, going up to about 38 million annually by ten years, factoring in about 340 million in capital costs over that period, plus the various other costs, like vehicles that would be associated. Thank you for your patience. I understand there's a lot of dense information there, but I'd like to pass it over to any questions you might have. Councilor Smith.
10 Thank you, mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the public safety service area and the Portland public, the Portland police bureau for completing the report. Is aaron smoot here. Could you come up to the to the table, please? In in February, I introduced a resolution that would require deputy city administrator for public safety to provide a report on police officer recruitment goals and costs. Because council was being asked to make major decisions about police staffing without a complete picture of what would actually take it would take to recruit, train, deploy and sustain additional officers. Council adopted that resolution and directed the deputy city administrator for public safety to answer several fundamental questions what the level and the organization structure of staffing would would look like and support the public safety outcomes, Portland expects. How long would it realistically take to recruit, hire, train and deploy additional officers? What would that growth cost, not only at the point of hiring, but over the long term, and what additional investments would be required in training, supervision, vehicles, equipment, facilities, civilian staff and professional development? And lastly, in how should Portland plan for these costs as our city and its public safety needs evolve over the next decade? So today's presentation presentation is the result of that direction that was given in February. I appreciate staff providing counsel with a more transparent and fact based foundation for this conversation. I want to emphasize that this report is not a final staffing plan, is it? Deputy chief hughes? And it does not recommend one specific number of officers. It gives council a framework for which to decide what services and outcomes we expect from PPB, and what staffing, time, infrastructure and funding will be required to deliver all these different subsets. So for me. Since this is not a a specific staffing plan, deputy chief, what additional analysis and community engagement are needed to turn it into an actionable, workload based staffing plan?
11 Thank you for the question, councilor Smith. Brian hughes, deputy chief, Portland police bureau I think you're spot on there. I think it would involve more public comment and input to help us to be more informed about exactly what the public wants to see with regards to what their police department looks like right now. We're under-resourced and not able to properly handle property crimes in an appropriate way, and that might be something that portlanders are interested in. So this the allocations that you saw earlier in the slides were, you know, what we would like to see, and based on feedback that we're hearing from public. But I think if we were to go forward and actually have an honest conversation about properly resourcing this police department, then we would have those kinds of conversations to help direct that work.
12 Thank you. I like that answer. And because we have to center what we do around what our community would like. And so having that kind of, of direction going forward, I think it's important and it's critical. And we would be intentional on making sure that we bring the public into a system that sometimes feels not as transparent as we should be, but centering all of our decisions around what what the public says. I think it's very helpful. In terms of pb to establish specific staffing requirements tied to the seven minute high priority response time ago. I know we've gotten a lot of. Pushback, and we've gotten a lot of criticism about how quickly we respond. If we could wave our magic wand today without any additional resources, are there ways that we can increase response time?
13 I think we're at a point now where we're at a bare bones organization and have trimmed a lot of the fat, especially in this year of budget cuts to we do the best we can and deploy the resources. We have the best we can. So right now, I say we're very lean organization. And when we start talking about making a serious impact on response times, then we start having to have the honest discussion about growing this police department.
14 So one of the things that I noted from the report, that was the presentation that we just were given, it said that patrol officers didn't go down. It was at 332, if I'm not mistaken.
15 That's correct.
16 So if we have maintained 332 patrol, it seems to me that we should be able to respond quicker and that the majority of of the the decrease were were in office positions.
17 I'll defer to dc hughes on this, but one thing that has changed is the nature of the calls. They are taking longer. We've also had policy changes like welfare hours. That takes about 10% of patrol officers time. And there are there are various factors which have contributed to that. Okay.
18 So what you're suggesting is that we still need additional patrol officers.
19 Well, so the the equation for patrol is you have the number of calls, the length of time a call takes, and the number of officers available to deal with them and the time that they're spending. And you have to balance those three factors. You either drive down the number of calls by diverting them somewhere else, or choosing not to respond to them at all, or you increase the number of officer time being spent on response, or you somehow manage to decrease the time it takes to respond to a call. But those are the three kind of primary elements that affect it.
20 Okay. Thank you. And my my last question, aaron, could you introduce yourself, please?
21 Sure. Aaron schmaltz, president, Portland police association.
22 You came and gave a brief presentation at my coffee with a cop and community. There were a couple of things that you wanted to point out about the report that was critical, that you thought that the people needed to know about. And as deputy chief noted, that any further expansion of this report should also include the community and what they want. What were those those items that you talked about that you thought were critical?
23 I talked a lot at that meeting. You know, I think overall, you know, historically the police bureau has been structured improperly. The way that you look at our funding mechanism. I know there's a lot of conversation around our staffing and how people are hired and how we navigate. But the police bureau does not have an overtime budget. There was a budget note from 2020 that indicated that we needed to make sure that we were staffing properly, and also ensuring that we had staffing trajectory. You know, when you look at the police bureau, vacancy savings has been how we've paid for for overtime in the past. And but at the end of the day, you know, I look at at the work we did with school police, I ran that program before it was disbanded. As the police bureau has lost staffing, we've never really done a true gap assessment of the work that is missing as a result of us just plugging holes. When we took the school police out of of the Portland public ecosystem, we actually did a gap assessment, and everyone was pretty surprised about the holes that police fill in the absence of other resources. But I can tell you that, for instance, when, when we would have like a football game, we worked directly with office of violence prevention with other partners to create and manifest a good safety plan working together. And I would just argue that as we continue to build other systems in Portland, unless we build those systems and ensure that our systems are working together, we might as well just throw the money in the trash because the bottom line is, is if we're not, you know, you create psr, you create, you know, increased ovp, all these things are good. But if they're not working directly, directly with and training with law enforcement to ensure that we have agreed upon outcomes, we're never going to see any actual benefit for that investment.
24 Yes. And I said this is my last question, but I want to direct this to kay lee, who is our interim public safety dc. A one of the things that I learned in, you know, this is like on the a job training, and it's a master course in how to understand what actually goes on. But I was surprised to learn that fire had a overtime budget that was put into the budget. And will you will you do the same for the police going forward? Is that on the table for discussion to have a overtime budget for police?
25 I think it's something that we can have a conversation with, with the police. As we look at developing the mayor's proposed budget, I think it's something truly tangible that we have to look at when we look at the limited resources that we have from a resource standpoint, human capital, from officers being out on the street and the demand for more officers as it relates to the number of calls that we have coming in and their ability to respond to them in a timely fashion, I think it really comes down to, as well, the level of service that we're looking for out of our police department. If we're looking for certain response times to be certain things, or we're looking for them to respond to certain type of calls, I think that's a conversation that we have to have as it relates to the resources that we have to be able to do that. Does overtime help in this conversation, or do we need to add additional officers? I would just, you know, put this one little caveat out here as well, too. We have to be cautious about the amount of overtime that we're asking officers to work, because at that point in time, just like driving or anything else, once you work so many hours, your response time, your ability to respond to these things is reduced tremendously. So we want to make sure that we're putting not only officers, but the public in the best safe, predictable predicament that we can put them in, considering the work that we're asking them to do.
26 I agree, and I was pleasantly surprised that the report had that there was going to be a two if if this was going to be implemented, that there was a 207% increase in community. You know, activity in community policing. And I was personally just happy to see that. Thank you.
27 Councilor. Morillo. And by the way, I think that I'm going to hope that we can hold ourselves to like five minutes a piece so that we have time for a second round.
28 No, it's not going to be five minutes. I have a lot to say on this. And if we're going to set standards for people on the committee, it has to be universal. Thank you guys for coming today and for sharing this report. I, I do have some pretty big concerns about the process that went into creating this report. A community member sent my office the results of a public records request that included 12 pages of feedback from PPB to leads in the public safety service area. And my reading of the report, compared to this feedback, is that a lot of correcting information and feedback is missing in this report, and that includes definitions and the characterizations of the positions. I was really struck by the fact that there is consideration for a new fourth precinct, and that there was direct feedback that they were unfamiliar with the research done to identify the fourth prix for precinct model, and are curious about what factors are included to inform the need for them. So I'm very curious about that assertion as well. So before I get into my questions, I just wanted to name some of that stuff. I was really struck by three things in the report that could be done to improve staffing and retention, that don't include hiring new officers right away. And I want to talk about those a little bit, because I feel like these are important areas to understand and work on before we launch into any kind of new hiring or staffing or investment plan for the call response times. On page 16 of the report, it says that the call response times have gone up at the same time that the number of calls or low, medium and high priority calls have gone down. In fact, response times to high priority calls have gone up the most. At the same time that they have seen the greatest decrease in call volume, the report states. This information, which is, I think, good to acknowledge, but it doesn't really explain why this would be. And something other than workload seems to be impacting call response times. So before we suggest adding any new officers, we should understand what the driver is for this and how we might correct for it in order to inform us for an actual staffing position. Because I, you know, sitting in this committee, we keep hearing the calls are just taking longer, but I have no clarity on why the calls are suddenly taking longer, what those factors are. And I think that's really critical because maybe our officers are initiating calls that are unnecessary. Maybe, you know, there's a lot of different things, but I would like to know why so we can make that decision. The report also. So does the bureau have a plan to explore what might be the root cause of some of these calls taking longer than they did before?
29 Councilor yes, we initiated that discussion with you all two weeks ago in this committee and are continuing the work to look at a better way of explaining that through the president of the, I'm sorry, the chair of the committee, and plan to come back at future meetings to discuss that more in depth, to have a more robust discussion on why the calls are taking longer. Certainly, de-escalation is part of that, and time is part of that. Given people the ability to make better choices, use time as a tactic, de-escalation as a tactic, number of officers as a tactic. There was an incident just this week up at the library, I think it was on Sunday where a person had what we believed to be a gun. Turned out it was a bb gun and was waving it around. Real populated area. If you've seen any of the social media posts on that, there's been several, but you see a good seven, eight, nine police officers standing there. Those are just the ones you see. There's other ones you can't see that are blocking the street to ensure somebody doesn't drive down or walk down into the middle of what we're trying to do there, we were able to use time and get additional resources there, including you may have seen the police shield. They're holding a big shield so they can safely go up and deal with this person, put them in handcuffs, and take the what turned out to be a bb gun away from them. But that's like a very visual reminder this week of what, you know, that looks like in practice. And, and, you know, a decade ago, I was asked the question here two weeks ago what that might have looked like. And I don't know that we would have spent that much time on a call like that. But, you know, through the settlement agreement and looking at how we operate as a police bureau, that's one of the changes we've made for the better that had a better outcome. So we'll come back at future caps presentations and dive into those a little bit more for you.
30 Thank you, I appreciate that. I think it'll be helpful for us to get more clarity, and we appreciate that. If there are efforts in de-escalation, I think that's great. The report also notes a number of concrete examples about how police could further reduce their call and workload by shifting work to other agencies, or from sworn to non-sworn staff. I thought that was pretty interesting, and I think that we should prioritize recalibrating workload before we work on staffing, so that we are making a proposal from the right starting point. I one example that stood out to me in the report was that on April in April 2026, the call allocation working group recommended that approximately 14,000 welfare check calls could shift from PPB to Portland street response. And the report also suggests that it would take 4 to 5 years to fully realize that shift in call load. Can you tell me why it would take that 4 to 5 years to shift that call load, or how we can make this a priority?
31 Yeah. In addition to the expansion plan that Portland street response currently has, that represents about a doubling of their capacity. And there's just a training pipeline expansion tempo that you know that that is the estimate from Portland street response of what they would take. I mean, I guess there are ways to speed that up if we wanted to invest dramatically in it. But, you know, doubling the size of an agency is, is a painful process.
32 What would it look like in practice if we were trying to speed up that process?
33 I would defer to Portland street response on that question. That's more of an operational area for them.
34 Okay. That's fine. We can ask that in the next meeting. We cover this. But I think I think that that's interesting, right? Because if there are 14,000 welfare calls where we have calls all the time in the city of actual violent incidents that we need police to respond to, and they I don't I don't think you should be spending your time on welfare calls. That's things that other people are trained for. And police are some of our most expensive employees. So any time that they're responding to something where it's not an immediate violent crime, we are spending the maximum amount of tax dollars and staff resources to respond to that type of call on on page 19 of the report, we also noted that officer initiated calls have been in the 21 to 23% range, or about 42,000 to 46,000 calls. The report says that these are calls where officers are spending a greater percentage of patrol time on self-initiated activities. And then on page 21, the report says that there is not enough capacity to investigate child abuse cases, domestic violence, property crimes, elder fraud or white collar crime and that before we consider staffing up investigations, we need to staff up patrol. Has the bureau considered limiting officer initiated calls in favor of improving call response times and investigation capacity needs?
35 Thank you for the question, councilor. You know, that's a balance. That's a balance that we constantly face with regards to the work that we do. A lot of the self-initiated work is traffic stops. And as I said two weeks ago, high crash corridor trying to reduce fatal crashes is an aspect of that. But then our stolen vehicle missions, they just did their last one on Saturday night. I'm so proud of them. I listened for about 15 minutes while I was attending an immigrant refugee welcoming week event at irco, and in that 15 minutes, I think they recovered 3 or 4 stolen cars. And I'm thinking, okay, that's 3 or 4 cars that we're going to get back to somebody that's probably just trying to make a living in this city and needs their car to do that. So, I mean, that's a giant bucket of self-initiated activity work that that we intentionally do. And I'm supportive of it. We'll continue doing it. But it's a balance. You're right. And we have to balance, you know, the call load and response times. But when we look at the call response times, we also break that down as well. You know, we have, you know, a car gets broken into and how long we respond to that versus how long we respond to the weapons calls that we discussed two weeks ago. And, you know, we, we are placing a priority on, on responding to the, the, the immediate priority, high priority one calls, unfortunately, the way priority calls are are banked right now, as you're report suggested two weeks ago, that includes the top three priorities, which is not only somebody is is could be injured right now or is being injured right now with or there's a weapon involved. Somebody could be injured to the third one, which is a crime is occurring now. Any crime is occurring now. So it's a constant balance, right? And then, you know, you have those life safety priorities. And then you also have kind of what is a customer service priority? You know, what are the expectations of portlanders if somebody's car gets broken into? Do I get a police response within an hour or, you know, 5 hours or 6 hours? I'd say on a day like Sunday when all the officers downtown are dealing with the person we believe to be armed, that's going to look quite a bit different. So I know that's a long winded answer to your question, but, you know, self-initiated work is, is an important part of what we do to keep to keep the city safe. So.
36 Councilor Morillo, I'm going to have to ask to move on to councilor Zimmerman, because I think that we want to get this done by 1030. And you've had ten minutes. That leaves about eight minutes for each of the rest of us. So councilor Zimmerman.
37 Okay, I'm interested in, and I don't know that I have the right language to describe the the function that I'm talking about, but what number of trainee slots does the bureau need every year above what we consider the full staffing model? And I and I say that from. Right. You all know I've spent a long time in the army. We have a pipeline of recruits that we know this many hundred thousand need to go to basic training every year to keep up with whatever the army says is the minimum standard for the for the country. Fire is kind of similar in terms of getting toward where they can start over staffing so that they're always have somebody in the, in the pipeline. So I'm trying to get a sense of what that looks like eventually. And that would that is somewhat unrelated to are we a, an 850 officer town, a 1000 officer town? It's what is the percentage to or how much do you address it to keeping that that pipeline always ready and, and always coming out of training to replace the next retiree. I guess I'm trying to get a sense of that because the way we we do a lot is we because we're in this situation of so many vacancies, I think it hasn't allowed me to understand just what is that that churn number. If we weren't in the vacancy moment, if we were at full staffing moment still, how many overages do we need to have to be in that? And I'm kind of curious about that.
38 I don't have the answer to that question. It's a fascinating question, though, to think, because we're going to be pushing that 877 number here, chief days very focused on hiring. And well, at the beginning of October here, bring in another double digit class of of hire, you know, new, new officers. The problem with the city in our police bureau in hiring and nutrition and everything else is we've, we've hired in waves, right, right. Over time, which then.
39 Hurts us 25 years later.
40 Sure does. Yeah. When they all retire. So hard to average that I don't know that we're seeing as many kind of retirement waves coming. There are still the favorable pay periods for people to retire, and so we expect to lose a certain amount. So I can bring that back to the team and see. But it'll be interesting to see because there's two two buckets to what you just talked about. It's that attrition with people leaving the bureau. And then it's also the day to day. You know, you have officers in training. We send officers for you know, I think right now it's two days in person, and we'll need to be able to cover the street while they're in that training. And we either do it on overtime or we do it with additional staffing. So I can break those two up, two out and get back to you.
41 Can I.
42 Have a sense you wanted to weigh in? Yeah.
43 I was leaning in, I think. Yeah. You know, I mean, to to chief's point, you know, the history of staffing the police bureau. We knew things were coming. There were a couple hiring freezes in around 14 and around 17. But also, you know, you look at where our staffing is now, if I'm correct, and if I'm wrong on the data, I'm sure one of you will point it out. But in 2019, we had about nine people in the training status because we were pretty fully staffed. And that number is above 100 today. So that 330 number that we have available on patrol, over a third of them actually aren't. And so that piece matters. We're also seeing that our our agency in the center of our staffing has a gap as a result of a bunch of people leaving in 2020. And so I think it's pushing half of the police bureau has less than five years on. And so our training officers are very junior, which I think is a structural deficit. And I mean, it used to be a big deal to become a coach. And now we're just really kind of please everyone be a coach because you have if you're going to staff quickly. And lastly, comparing us to fire is just completely not possible because fire has like both local and national standards around, you know, we must have 171 butts in the seat at all time to ensure for a lot of different structural things that matter in fire safety. The police bureau has never we have mandatory minimums, but we don't meet them and we don't have mandatory overtime, which I'll tell you right now to the city administrator's point, I don't want like people say all the time that I just want my members making a bunch of overtime. When I was new, there was no overtime. We would all be sitting, waiting on the radio for someone to ask to get a couple hours, because we weren't getting paid very much then either. But I would love to have a fully staffed agency where no one got any overtime, and everyone just worked 40 hours because it's better for everyone. And so I think what the one thing the city has never done is set like a ten year longitudinal plan of this is where we want to be year over year. This is how we want to partner with all of our different groups. This is what a fully funded, fully woven public safety model looks not just for police, but for everyone. And we set those goals and we meet them and we don't change it. And it's hard because politics change. But policing isn't political. Policing as far as staffing, shouldn't be political.
44 I agree in that ten year trajectory, and I appreciate both these answers. I think that we are lacking a a designator for our patrol officers. Actually all officers, we're lacking a designator for their readiness level. And. Right. I'm putting my kind of army hat on here because that's the language I have. But readiness, meaning they're ready for the mission. That doesn't mean trainee. That doesn't mean dps est. That doesn't mean in a, you know, a ride along kind of thing. It means how many are out of training and ready to go. Otherwise, we call them trainees until. And so I think that that would be a helpful designator in the way that data is presented. If in case we do have such a large number who are really not actually available for patrol shift alone in the traditional sense, then I don't want them included in, in a staffing presentation without an asterisks, right. So that we can understand that I. I have mentioned in this committee before, and I do want to get to the place where every time the police bureau doesn't hit minimum staffing in one of our precincts, that it's a red star cluster up. And I think we need to start letting the public and the city administrator and the mayor and this council know how many days, how many shifts a year are going below minimum staffing, right? Other agencies can do that. I think that we should incorporate that into our culture, because I actually think that portlanders have not been made as aware of how many times that they are going about their business. And the city's police bureau is below minimum staffing, while the city's fire bureau has a mandatory overtime so that they don't hit below minimum staffing. I just think because I, I don't disagree on you heard me last time, I think talk about this and I'm not getting to a place where I want to have a bunch of folks on, on, on overtime. Actually, I agree with you, president schmaltz. I think that overtime is the worst case scenario. And getting to a place where you are ready with your 40 hours, your, your, your, your wake and spry, okay, you get into 50, 60, 80 hours. And I think we're in dangerous territory, but I don't know that we are letting the public and the city council know just how often that if we were a minimum staffing agency. We would have. We would have somebody more on overtime or that we would how far we are below. So I'm just thinking through some of those things, but I do think that getting a sense for of the 300 and some odd patrol officers, how many are trainees is a critical need to better understand our current pipeline. And in the ten year trajectory and looking at trend models, having an understanding for what is the authorization authorization above? What is considered the full staffing model for the Portland police bureau? In order to incorporate the trainee number each year? And and what that flow looks like, I think, is how, in the longer term, we get ahead of this to the debate about size of the bureau and etc. Like, I think I'm pretty clear in terms of where I think to go, but I don't think that this aspect of the conversation, I don't think this aspect of the conversation actually changes based on the size of the bureau, because it's a modeling aspect. So I'd be looking for that. And I appreciate councilor Smith bringing this forward. I want to hear more of the conversation, chair.
45 Thanks.
46 Thank you. Councilor councilor Kanal.
47 Just a clarifying question, chair. Is this the only time we're going to get a chance to talk about this? Because I think this is a higher priority than at least the second item on the agenda. And I'd be open to tabling that one or pushing it back a meeting if to make more time for that.
48 Well, the second item in the agenda has been for us numerous times. I want to make sure that we get through it. This is not the only time we're going to be talking certainly about I mean, I've already said I want to have another session on response times, and I'm going to indicate some of the things that that I think that need to be addressed. But I, I really want to make sure that we get through the second item. And the third item.
49 Yeah, I guess.
50 I can maybe give it a little attitude and stretch us until 1037, but I don't want to go beyond that.
51 Okay. I, I really want the, the fact that some of our questions are not going to get asked to not be taken as we agree with the things we didn't get to cover and just wanted to get that on the record first. I want to start. Thanks everybody for being here. I want to start with commending chief day and the personnel division for the hiring that's been going on. And chief hughes, you mentioned that I've been supportive of filling vacancies. Have been since I started working at the city in 2021. I think we need to talk about what the target we're hiring to is. That's separate, as I think was noted, but we can talk about that. I think one of the things that that has been coming up as we look at these trainee counts, is that many of the much of the staffing time, sorry, the staffing numbers that we're seeing include people that that absent any changes to hiring or the number of officers will be fully ready in the months ahead. Right. There's a bunch of people in the pipeline right now. And so I think that's, that's something that we should take into account as we're looking at where we want to get to. I also think just by way of framing, I remain categorically opposed to hiring freezes in public safety, and also that we've historically said that public safety just means police and fire, but also boec Portland street response, the whole public safety system. And I was really concerned when last year, the hiring freeze was partially applied to public safety. I also wanted to pick up councilor Zimmerman's thread about overhiring for training. Maybe fire is not the best comparison, but boec also has a similar thing, and I know labor's more familiar with that, at least that one, because pay also represents some of the employees that boec as well with relation to minimums. I think that I agree that we should show when we make them or not. I think the challenge that we have is we don't have a consensus view of what minimums are in terms of numbers. When I've dug into that deeply last time or two times ago now, I was told that the primary not only factor was historic staffing patterns from a time with different crime patterns, different 911 call volumes, and a different first responder ecosystem that includes psr and more. So I'd like to figure that all out. On slide six. Nick, you said that the patrol staffing level has been pretty stable. The decline in officers has not affected, has not really affected patrol staffing levels. It's been taken from other areas of the bureau. And then we've seen, as councilor Morillo pointed out, calls going down, response times going up in particular for high priority calls and staffing remaining stable. I think we've talked about the complexity of calls. I think that's important. We've talked about welfare hours, which are just a good thing to do. I also want to talk about prioritization, relatively speaking. There's there's sort of two things. You know, I was actually standing across the street from the library situation on Sunday for at least the later portion of that. And so having the context, you don't always have the context of what initiated the call. When you show up in the the situation's already partially in resolution. I can say that that we do see a lot of officers there at the time, and then when it's done, it's done. So I did want to just point that out. I'm not I don't know that that necessarily advances any idea, but just watching how that played out was really helpful for me. I do want to talk about prioritization, though, because we saw last year that $800,000 was spent in a month on protest response at a single building, and we did change that over the course of last year. I want to point that out. On the whole, we do know that protesters were not protected there. We know that transphobic protesters got a police escort at the sports bra in the last week. And I think that there's a there's a having a consistent approach to that and understanding what police's role is going to be in that. And also the relative level of priority is something I'm very interested in. I also wanted to flag the self-initiated calls. I'm. There are two things in this conversation that have kind of baffled me. One is the idea that we're conflating self-initiated calls with missions. I was really confused by that. So I want to dig in a little bit on that. And the other was about the table of what would be added with relation to the. Yeah. Thank you. So with relation to the, the, the missions piece, reducing, that is something that seems like it should be an important priority. And I keep hearing that increasing self-initiated calls is a priority. I'm baffled by the idea that a police officer seeing, like a homeless person just existing and pulling over, which I've seen at the on point on the south side of lombard and portsmouth several times now, is something that should be taking away officer capacity from 911 calls. I, I perfectly get the example of missions and investigations and have constantly been bringing this up as something we should be increasing priority for. So I was very confused by that, and I just wanted to get that on the record. Chief, could you speak a little bit more to that because you mentioned a stolen vehicle situation, and I think that's important to bring up. But I also know that a lot of the self-initiated calls we've been seeing, this is why I asked about priorities two weeks ago. Priority levels have been not in that space. So can you give a little more on that?
52 Yeah. So the to bring it back to what you were just talking about, the on point call that you've talked about a couple of times now. I'll bring it right back to what you said about the library call. You don't know how that call started. And if you just look at social media and see a bunch of cops pointing guns and long guns at a homeless person on their back, that doesn't look good. But when you understand the full context, as I presented to you today, then you understand about why they took the the time they did and did everything they could. And from me as a police executive, seeing that and seeing all the people that were standing around, including you potentially in the line of fire, if that person was not well or high on drugs and mental suffering, maybe suffering from mental illness, I don't know, and actually had a gun and decided to shoot the the level of problem that we would have had there. You know, for me, you know, it's a resource issue. I'd rather have enough police officers there that can block every street off and get those people out of the danger, including you. So that's part of this that we, you know, you have to understand the full picture of what's going on here. I don't know the nature of what was going on on point. I don't know how the police were called there or why they were called there. Generally speaking, police officer, there's people that are drug affected. You can go within ten blocks of this place and probably find ten right now people that are drug affected, and I don't have the police officers to go and interact with all of those people. And as councilor Morillo says, maybe that's not the best response for a most expensive resource to be interacting with those people. Generally speaking, the welfare checks that my officers go on are more extreme cases, cases where somebody is passed out maybe halfway in the street and it's presents a safety issue. Those are those would be self-initiated calls that would fall into that bucket. As far as self-initiated activity, as officers have time between calls for service. And I don't know how many calls are holding right now, I could look. I'm sure there's probably double digits. They they try their best to make a difference and impact what's going on in the city. And they do it through traffic stops and engaging with people, checking people have warrants. If they see somebody dealing drugs, they'll go and interact with them. And a lot of this is community driven to Loretta smith's point or councilor Smith's point, when you're at your coffee of the coffee with a cop and you're hearing from the public about all these problems that are going on, including the bottle drop at 122nd and glisan, we have officers that are working on data driven approaches right now to go out there and fix that, and they do it through self-initiated activity every single time they interact with somebody and go out with somebody. My data people are constantly on them to create calls and ensure that we can track that and be data informed about what we do. So all of that generates self-initiated activity. And so for me, it's a balance, right, between ensuring that our most high priority calls for service, the threats to our citizens and our public are taken seriously and respond to those in a timely fashion. So does that answer some of your questions?
53 Yeah, I do have a little bit more on the on point, because I did see the beginning of one of those situations, but I think that may be better offline, but I appreciate that. I think the situation we could go down a lot of different pathways with this. And I think it's really important to do. I want to talk about the. I have two questions I want to get to. One is about the workload analysis framework. So I really appreciate that and I'm glad that that happened. Is there a plan to update the police staffing numbers page on the police website to mirror workload analysis framework, because it still has the already debunked officers per 1000 capita thing on there as the primary metric of comparison at the bottom of that page. And so is, is this does this show a shift in pb's thinking? If so, I would be very happy to to to shout the praise from the rooftops on that.
54 I'd have to get back with the team and find out. Councilor, I don't have an answer for you there.
55 Okay, I will, yeah, well, then I will just take the opportunity to advocate there. Okay. The, the thing that relates to that is. Well, actually, let me follow up on a different thread. Self-initiated calls report puts it under patrol time. In the response you gave to councilor Morillo, it sounded like you were saying it more closely relates to investigative time. Can you can you kind of give us a little bit more on what category that fits into in your mind? I mean, it's usually done by patrol officers, but as we know, patrol officers are often doing investigative tasks or investigative tasks.
56 Yeah, the bulk of it is in the patrol world. And but, you know, investigative is that's a huge bucket if they, like I talked about two weeks ago, if somebody breaks into a car and they miraculously have some time to follow up on that call, which I can't see how they would. But if they did and were to go out and follow up, investigate, maybe get video from a plaid pantry if their credit card was used, that would be an investigative type thing. I think the bulk of the self-initiated activity that you're going to see are subject stops and traffic stops. So in the patrol world.
57 I see councilor Novick putting it up. So I'll make my question into a comment I did. This is less about anybody up here, but because it affects the ecosystem and the response that you gave nick to, to councilor Morillo question about psr and the the speed of it, I want to just note for the record that the the reason why it's so hard to expand it has been intentional delay and frankly, sabotage of that program by the people on this side over the last few years that predate us psr. It predates seattle's program. We're still in an extended pilot that's not 24 over seven, and seattle is now a full department. And so I'm glad that we have a permanent hired program manager there. But it's still under a structure that isn't necessarily the best for it as a division, not its own bureau. And so in terms of raising that expansion tempo, it is leadership that is not anybody on that side. And I don't want to imply that it is, but that's a part of the ecosystem we have to fix, because we should have had what people thought we were getting when we piloted it five years ago, what they thought they'd have by now, and we haven't gotten it yet. So I'm looking forward to to getting the same response. Nick about that, that councilor Morillo is going to get from from psr about how we can accelerate that because it's unacceptable to say now we're just delaying and we're starting over this expansion. Every time we have to expand for what we should have had five years ago now, and not keep pushing back the starting point of the expansion program to get it to 24 over seven. Thanks.
58 Thank you councilor. So I want to go back to page 18. And by the way, we I don't want to overlook the fact that what you're asked for is like, how long are we taking, how much money it would take to do a certain kind of expansion? And we haven't really been touching on that. But I appreciate all the detail that you that you offered on that. Going to page 18 of the report, it talks about response times going up, and it says there's many factors that contribute to this, including increased travel times, more complex or higher acuity calls requiring more officers and fewer available patrol officers, meaning longer wait times. And then mr. Mcdonnell's presentation says, we have the same number of patrol officers, and then president schmidt says, well, it's not really true, because a lot of those are trainees. And I would just encourage you, when you talk about a topic, to say the same things each time and talk about the nuances, because otherwise it looks like you're contradicting yourselves. Well, we have fewer available patrol officers. No, we have the same number of patrol officers. And if the answer is we have the same number, but they're not really as available, then please say that. I would also say that the the factors that were listed in page 18 don't include something that chief hugues mentioned, which I've heard before, is important, which is that the police are on some calls. The police are spending more time than they used to because they're more attention to deescalation, etcetera. And that strikes me as something different from more complex or higher acuity calls requiring more officers. That means you're spending more time on the same high acuity calls. And what I'd like to see when we take up the issue of response times again, is breaking these out. Do we have more complex calls? What's the date on that? What kind of calls are there? Do we have higher acuity calls, whatever that means? Are we spending more time in individual calls because we are doing a better job? And I'd like to have that kind of broken out. Another thing that I wanted to note is that somewhere in this report, it says that in when it comes to clearance rates, crimes that are never assigned to an investigator are not counted in the clearance rates. And I find that extremely alarming. I mean, I think that we should at least have a statistic for clearance rates, including crimes that were actual crimes that just reports that were not assigned, and then maybe a separate clearance rate for signs that crimes that were assigned, but only having it for crimes that were assigned is not acceptable, frankly. And another thing I wanted to say is that I think that there's you talk about would be good to have more officers for domestic violence cases, for child abuse cases, for property crime investigations. And that's something I'm not complaining about. You're not providing detail on how much we need for each now. But I think that in future discussions about potentially increasing the size of the police force, we should have sort of a discussion of, okay, here's how many more people we think we would need in order to properly respond to domestic violence crimes. Here's how many people we think we would need to properly respond to the child abuse crimes. Here's how many people would think we would need to have more burglary investigations, because I think that what the public would like to see, if we're talking about increasing the size of the police force, is increasing the size for what? For what particular purposes. So those are just I mean, if anybody has any off the cuff responses, I'd be happy to hear them. But I just wanted to get those observations out.
59 If I may. Both you and councilor Morillo have brought up, you know, work that's very important and that has historically been done by officers in non patrol responses. And to the point of the study that those things have been removed, you know, icac or the internet crimes against children. It's some of the most insidious things we see in our in our culture and society. You know, that team is much smaller. And also and to the point of traffic, you know, having traffic officers, I know that you guys just passed a no right on red ordinance. And, you know, there is the question of, you know, who's going to enforce it and how we're going to navigate that. And again, you know, just deciding what our priorities are, all of the things that you you mentioned, chair Novick are things that are priorities that we have seen dwindle. The police bureau's structure historically was patrol would respond, provide a package to some kind of non patrol response to investigate. And we've seen nearly all of those catch basins be removed as a result of attrition, because we have 200 less police officers today than we did 20 years ago. And so again, it's an issue of priority. It's an issue of structure. It's an I mean, as a street sergeant, you know, an issue of we do see our sergeants responding and taking more time to respond to some of to some of our more difficult societal issues. Acuity is always kind of a hard measure because it depends on those being acted upon, I think. But we do need to, you know, allow our bureau to set those priorities for one and for two, set a clear political statement about how we want to navigate all those things.
60 Thank you. I okay, and maybe now set aside seven minutes to have a lightning round. Any any councilors want to get in a couple of minutes, get further questions on the table, even if we don't have time to answer them. Legacy and legacy. Councilor Kanal.
61 Thank you, chair. Novick I. I think the thing that I wanted to to talk about here. The table, the other thing that baffled me, I mentioned there were. Two is the increase in a line that that has three things together on it. This is slide six, I believe. Which has. It's a. The second line, it says community engagement slash bhu slash sro. First off, sro here, behavioral health unit and school resource officers, right?
62 Yes.
63 Okay. So we've talked about community engagement and how there's a difference between the work of like former chief lavelle and that area and natasha harnsberger, all of that, which I am very supportive of. And the idea of just broadly being at things. We talked about the holiday markets. I won't reiterate that. Generally supportive of the idea of having having the resources it needs. I don't like the idea of without any policy conversation on whether or not we want to return this program. Talking about expanding the school resource officer model, I, I think that that sergeant schwartz is correct, that there were gaps that were created for Portland public schools. I think that's their responsibility to handle. And I think one thing that we've done, and my colleague, councilor Smith, has brought this up in other contexts. Many times we take on jobs that other jurisdictions should be doing quite a bit. And I want to have that conversation. I also think that the model of school resource officers is not one that we should just be bringing back without a conversation, and I really want to that that was pretty problematic to me. I think we should disaggregate that stat, have it separate and ideally keep it at zero for that particular line while looking at you getting what it needs. North precinct needs, needs, the capital work, there's no question about that. The physical building, I don't think anyone has who's been in that building thinks otherwise. I think it's pretty clear that the central precinct needs replacement or work as well. Similarly, though we haven't had the conversation outside of the bureau referencing it and other things for the the fourth precinct. So that's all context. My lightning question is where's the authorization or where's the prior conversation about the where the stuff would go? Because some of this stuff makes a lot of sense in here. Op support traffic transit makes sense to me, for example. But even if it is a, it's a 1,500%, but it's six people. So anything's going to have a huge percentage change. Where were these things identified?
64 So I think that warrants additional discussion, like you said. And like councilor Smith said from public input, this was just kind of take a look at what where the bureau is, where we'd like to aspirationally see it go. Counselors have time numerous times told me that they would appreciate a precinct per district, that they could be connected to their commander, their command staff, and we could, you know, have each, you know, precinct aligned with council districts. So that's where that came from. Some of the other conversations are just like president was saying, when you scale up the organization and, you know, make it bigger, there's a number of other areas that need to expand as well, like including traffic or traffic. But training, you know, that is a, I think a miss on this slide where we didn't really proportionately increase the training as much as I think we probably should have. That's kind of a finite pipeline, though, because because of the state academy, we can only get so many people through the state academy. Right. So this is aspirational. It needs more vetting out. I think for, like I said, with discussion with public about what they would like to see from their police department. So yeah, right now I don't have all the details on exactly how that was. I was part of some of these conversations. And I think, frankly, it's mostly just scale increase.
65 And just on the precinct, we modeled an additional precinct because we don't have currently somewhere to put 350 new sworn officers in the ancillary non-sworn staff. You could model this with three precincts. You would need to substantially increase each precinct, and it would be kind of a wash financially. That's just a decision that would have to be made.
66 I get that for operations. I think capital would.
67 Can I respond to the just the sro portion just because it's important to me because I ran it two minutes quickly.
68 I want to give councilor Just.
69 To the point sro is it should say isd, the youth services division was not just cops in schools. It was a very robust program. And at the coffee with the cop, very prominent leaders in our black community have said to me, they want to see our cops playing basketball with kids again. But I would tell you that it's a moral imperative for all of us and not just a responsibility of Portland public to ensure the diversion of our young people from the criminal justice system. And that starts with partnership. And so I do think that us having that partnership matters. How we do that is is definitely worthy of, to your point, desegregation and real conversation. But it was through our youth services division that we saved a lot of kids from a pathway they were on. And that partnership begins with non-conflict interaction with young people.
70 I look forward to that conversation.
71 Councilor Smith.
72 Thank you. Thank you, mr. Chairman. I want to thank everybody for coming. And I don't have a lightning question, but I think perception is reality, and the perception that the public has is that we don't have enough folks to, to man the the bottle drop on 122nd in glisan. We don't have enough folks to stop the the drug dealing that happens, you know, a block two blocks, three blocks away. And that perception, while it may not be true, but it is what drives folks. And I think it's going to be so important for us to have those conversations that you were talking about, chief, in regards to the community, have those conversations all over those, you know, coffees with community all across the city. I've invited many of our our city council people to come and, and participate. And I, I'm happy to say that the chair he came by. And so he saw the importance of, of having community. And we have community from not just district one, but from the entire city. But I do think that we need to have some conversations across all districts with law enforcement, psr we brought them out last month to make sure that people understand that there are different levels of public safety and the different levels of public safety that we that we have. So I just want to say thank you. I know that you have been on a a tour in regards to this report, and it's thank you for putting it together. Because for us, it just gives me a baseline of, of understanding where we could be, what the possible is, whether or not we're going to go in that direction that this report says. But at some point we're going to be able to to do some of these items in a way that's meaningful and that it cuts down the, the, the overtime because the overtime is, is egregious. But I understand it and I understand why we can't get the overtime down. But I am concerned, just like the ca lee is about having people do overtime and and they're not fully rested and healthy to be able to, to address some of the concerns that they have to, as you know, a patrol officer. So thank you very much, mr. Chairman. I don't have any more questions, and I am I will lend my time to someone else who has another question.
73 Thank you, councilor. And we actually have hit 1037, which is my chosen extension time. Thank you very much, councilor, for being responsible for this report being generated and for this discussion. And thank you. Thank you all. Really appreciate it. Could the clerk read the next item?
74 Item number three, document 2026-123. Amend code related to prohibitions on possession of firearms within certain city buildings to disallow affirmative defense for persons with concealed handgun licenses. Amend code sections 3.18.02014, a point six, 0.010 and 20.1, 2.050.
75 Thank you. This item was brought to us by president Dunphy, but originally the idea came from the administration, and the administration is here at its highest form. And see a lee, I wanted to ask lee to lead off by just explaining why the administration thinks this is an important thing to get done.
76 Thank you. Councilor Novick. Just for some historical purposes as it relates to this subject matter and how it came to be, this conversation really started in kind of two separate areas of the administration run from a public safety service area conversation as it relates to them being made aware that the county was moving in this direction of prohibiting firearms within their public meetings. The second one was from my end, and this goes back to some of the conversations in council meetings that we had as it relates to the ice facility, and when we had a citizen actually kind of break the barrier and come into the dyess area, I started asking questions of our staff. What are our protocols as it relates to safety, security, as it relates to our council meetings? And within that conversation, it came up that we do allow firearms concealed carry into our chambers. And that was a new phenomenon for me, because majority of the cities that I've worked in are aware of and just best management practices, it was not allowed in the council chambers or council setting. So we started having this conversation along with the public safety service area, which stated to me at that point in time that they were evaluating valuating this situation, but also in the council president's check in, I kind of asked his thoughts on the matter as well as it relates to, you know, what he has seen through the history of this body and being a council aide previously and also serving as a council president, what was his appetite for consideration of taking a look at this policy from a best practices standpoint? One of my responsibilities, as in this role, is just to ensure the safety not only of staff, but even the community that are entering these chambers to voice their concerns, feedback, or just provide comments to the city council as it relates to certain policies or discussion points that are happening in front of this body. I do, and I did feel it was a concern, especially as tensions are rising on a lot of these conversations that we're having at the dais to ensure that we're creating a safe environment for not only the council, but also for citizens and community members who are joining us on a meeting basis to ensure that they are safe during these proceedings. That was really the essence of why, as administration, we thought it was good to have this conversation. Anytime, you know, we're looking at best management practices that may impact the way that people engage with us. We want to make sure we're doing it in a constructive and intentional fashion. And that was part of the reason why we wanted to bring it from this body for consideration. We know ultimately, the council will make the final decision as it relates to it, but we just wanted to make sure that council was aware of what was happening around us and the surrounding areas, but also bringing subject matter expertise to the conversation as well around best management practices as it relates to these type of settings and meetings to ensure that people are safe.
77 Thank you, mr. Administrator. I want to note that at some point here, I'm going to introduce councilor Dunphy's amendment two, which would require the city administrator to adopt an administrative rule to clarify various things, including a standard operating procedure for enforcement of such prohibitions that uses include that includes notice and opportunity to cure ejection or exclusion prior to referral to law enforcement. And I just want to give you the opportunity to say that your intention to set up a process which will make it clear that referral to law enforcement is a last resort.
78 100%.
79 Thank you, president Dunphy. I saw your hand up earlier. Do you want to add anything?
80 You know, I just was hoping to clarify some of the specifics of what this new amendment does and and some of the work that has gone on since my last time being here. I think this is my fourth, maybe fifth time for this committee on this item. But I, you know, this is an item that, as has been discussed, I am introducing on behalf of the administration. But this is something I have my full weight behind. I'd like to just sort of note a couple of things that have changed and some of the things that you specifically mentioned here. First, city's hr policies prevent city staff from carrying firearms on the job. The administration administrative rule is workplace workplace violence prohibited. Hr, ar 4.12. Council passed this back in 2002 by ordinance, and so no employees or elected officials should have been carrying at work for the last 25 years. Second, as was mentioned, if this ordinance were to pass the highest level of criminal risk for somebody who brought a concealed carry licensed gun into one of the either the Portland building, city hall or the 1900 building would be a class a misdemeanor. That is a real penalty. But as you may hear from staff later, that person would need to make a lot of compounding bad decisions to get the police called on them for having a concealed handgun in here. And at the end of all the possible decision trees, there would not be a felony conviction. And finally, state law has really strong preemptions on local gun laws. So essentially, if we're going to exclude concealed handguns from these buildings, we only have this one tool. We can soften some of the edges. And the Dunphy two amendment does some of that. But we can't invent new ways for Portland to regulate guns that Salem hasn't given us. So the amendment does two things. First, when mike porter took over on this ordinance, when linda law retired, he noticed that the code as written could potentially be read as creating a new local level firearm violation that would be preempted under state law. So Dunphy two clarifies that that is not the case. Then the amendment directs the city administrator to create administrative rules through standard rulemaking process. To clarify a few concerns that have come up in the hearings. First, to councilor Zimmerman's concerns, we would require security to have standard operating procedures for dealing with an unauthorized chl, ensuring that we start with education on the rules and an opportunity to do the right thing and go store the one second to councilor. Nils concerns the city administrator would need to define the exact terms around which buildings are considered chl free zones, and lay out process for other buildings to be temporarily or permanently excluded or dis included. That would mean that if we have additional rules around firearms at a community board meeting that's not in one of these three buildings. The way we decide to do or not do that should be consistent and uniform across the city. So, colleagues, I hope that this is my last opportunity to be before you. I urge you to adopt the Dunphy two amendment. And thank you for everybody for the feedback. It has meaningfully improved this ordinance, and I, of course, urge you to vote yes and refer this to full council. And I'm available for questions. Though there are far better subject matter experts here who can answer better questions than me. Thank you.
81 Thank you, mr. President. Councilor Kanal, is that a legacy hand or is that a real hand? It's a real hand. It's a real hand. Go ahead.
82 Said two questions. One is, you know, in the description of the amendment, it says that it it attempts to clarify something with relation to what what buildings we're talking about. But then in the the code itself, this is amendment Dunphy two. It says that the city administrator will adopt a policy identifying. So my. Just to be clear, our intention, if this amendment should pass, is that the city administrator will decide whether or not a building is included in this or not. I think it's fairly clear that the three downtown buildings are going to be in this 1900 building, Portland building in here. But in terms of other things, our our intention, if this should pass, is that the city administrator will be making that decision through a process that is consistent, consistent, but ultimately not council. Is that correct?
83 In as much as that standard rule making generally is the purview of the the administration and the public process involved in that. But there is often a an opportunity for council to weigh in as well. I'll turn to the city administrator for that, though.
84 I'll have to lean on legal for that one.
85 And the other question I have is legal, too, so I'll just get it out of the way, although I'm not sure if it's for mike or a different attorney, and I'll let him say it. There are bodies that constitute governing bodies under the charter that may want their meetings, regardless of location, to be included or not. And I want to make sure that there would be nothing preventing, for example, the cbpa from saying our meeting, even if it's not here, constitutes a governing body and official meeting and should be subject to this protection and that there's no legal we're not we're not curtailing that or affecting it in any way is my is the question.
86 Thank you, councilor Carl michael porter, the city attorney's office. I'll take them in reverse order, since that's top of mind. And I'm just coming back from a couple of weeks off. So I'm a little slow. But so to your first question, robert taylor spoke to this several weeks ago and said that this can be as expansive or as narrow for subcommittees and groups as council and city administrator's office through the rule making process, wanted to make it. So I think there's room for that sorry.
87 Room for that. Meaning that this amendment Dunphy two would not curtail that in any way.
88 Correct.
89 Okay. Thanks.
90 Yeah. And then to your first question, starting from the beginning, we talked about clarifying and then I can't remember the I word we use, but identifying, perhaps clarifying, meaning that the statutes, there are three ordinances that are affected by this, this amendment. And that's the clarifying that the cross titles 14 and a few others 14, 20 and three, we're clarifying language. And then to the identification portion that others could speak to. But. But I worked on as well. The what we're attempting to do is take the terms of the, the state law that was passed and then give them meaning through administrative rules. So governing body, things like that is the identification piece.
91 Thank you. Goodness. I see no counselors in the queue. Does anybody have anything to say? Councilor Zimmerman.
92 Are we just on the amendment?
93 Actually good point. I should I should introduce the amendment. I introduced Dunphy amendment two. I would appreciate a second.
94 Second.
95 Thank you, counselor Smith. Seconds. So now it's introduced to the amendment. Counselor Zimmerman.
96 Thank you. Well, I appreciate some of the work that has gone on. I think some of the spirit that's behind this, the council president, when he was describing this amendment, said that a person would have to make a lot of compounding bad decisions for a class a misdemeanor to be used. That's actually not how laws are enforced. It's not how laws are written. So an sop is, I think, a good procedure, but a different or new security guard can quickly just get ahold of police and say, I have a I have a violation occurring here. And then that police officer could show up and decide to enforce. What I'm trying to paint a picture here is that. We shouldn't pass a law that has such a broad discretion in terms of. Or let me say it this way we shouldn't pass a law and spec and expect that it will never get enforced because of this idea of discretion. And I think that when you do, you see that things can get used in in different ways. And so I'm cautious there. And I and I say that with respect for the amendment and what it's trying to achieve. But again, I'll go back to this continues to actually not address those people today who are following the law. And it's not addressing those people today who are breaking the law. It is creating a new class of law to be broken by those who have already put their name on, on a, on a registry and gotten fingerprinted and gone through the training program. Et cetera. Et cetera. To meet the letter of the law. So I just to the amendment only chair I just wanted. I will likely support this amendment because I think it makes this underlying better. But this underlying idea that nobody is going to ever violate this law. And so don't worry about it is, is not a way in which I believe. We should be tackling
97 This. A gun law violation is a serious violation and. Well, I'll hold I'll hold there until we get to the underlying. Thank you chair.
98 Thank you, counselor Smith.
99 Thank you. Thank you, mr. Chair. Who am I talking to? Am I talking to council president? As the maker of the of the ordinance or to the dcai.
100 Kind of think you can take your pick. Okay, counselor.
101 I'll ask the dca if a license concealed carry carrier holder unknowingly enters a covered building with a firearm. Will that individual first be informed of the restriction and given an opportunity to leave and secure the firearm before the police are contacted?
102 I would believe so, yes.
103 Okay. And to to back that up, under what circumstances would staff immediately refer someone to law enforcement, rather than first offering an opportunity to comply?
104 And I'm I'm going to be speaking a little off the cuff because this would all be a part of the sop that would be developed for this. I think when a any person that was entering our facility and not complying with the rules of this facility, we will first try to communicate with that individual and escort that individual out of the facility just through our normal norms of our security protocols here at the city. If that person is refusing to leave, just like if we had someone refusing to leave the chambers or the building after they have been asked to leave, then we would engage with police to come on scene to have that person comply with leaving the facility.
105 Okay. And when we're making this transition, will signs be posted at the building entrances? And will they be visible before a person enters the security screening area?
106 Yes. And we'd have to meet ADA compliance as well too. So even the signage or whatever we do, we have to be compliant so that people would know that they're entering a gun safe zone as they enter our facilities.
107 And the last question is, who will train security personnel and city employees on the progressive enforcement procedure, and how will the city ensure it it is applied consistently?
108 Yeah, very good question. As it relates to city employees, that's part of our normal training as we onboard people into the organization as letting them know they're not supposed to carry guns into the facility. Yeah. As it relates to our security, we will leave that up into our head of security. Manny. To work with our contractor, because this is a contract service that we have as it relates to our facility security. Now, to make sure that they are aware of our policies and procedures as it relates to carrying concealed or carrying guns, period, on our premises.
109 I appreciate that. Thank you. And council president, I just want you to know that I am prepared to support this ordinance because I believe that government meetings should be safe and they should be welcoming spaces. But lawful gun owners must receive clear notice when when the rules change and someone who enters without threatening anyone and genuinely does not know that a building is covered, should be informed and given a a meaningful opportunity to comply before the situation becomes a criminal matter. So I appreciate your your comments.
110 Ca thank you. Councilor. Councilor Kanal.
111 Just to clarify on the. Would you expect ca lee that the the signage would be somewhat similar, different content, but similar in terms of where it is and how it's used to the sanctuary and protect Portland initiative signage that's gone up probably.
112 So I would want to look at it more in detail to kind of see directly where that signage is placed throughout our entering our facilities, but also inside our facilities. But I could see it lining up pretty well with that.
113 Okay. Yeah, I think I'm generally inclined to support the amendment that doesn't I still have questions. Most of my questions are about the underlying ordinance, though. I. I think I don't love the idea of of us continually saying we're going to do things through administrative rule. This is narrower than I had originally thought it was going to be. So I I'm okay with that because it is not actually substituting on some of the questions that my colleagues raised. The code itself has some guardrails for that. And I think if we have an issue, we should be changing those guardrails as opposed to this part. So I'm going to support the amendment. But I do think we should really get into the details on the the ordinance itself, proposed ordinance itself.
114 Thank you, councilor. Seeing no one else in the queue for the amendment, could the clerk please call the roll on the amendment?
115 Yes. For the amendment a labeled denv two Kanal. I Morillo I Zimmerman. I Smith. I Novick. I with five eyes. The motion to amend the ordinance, as shown in Dunphy two, has been approved.
116 All right. Any comments? Questions to the underlying. Zimmerman.
117 Okay, we've had this topic up a few times. I've been in a briefing with some city staff from the attorney's office and from the public safety service area. On September 1st, I sent an email to the city administrator and one of our senior deputy or chief deputy attorneys asking for the records related to all the work that was important to the origin of this work. That records request has gone unanswered. I have received no records, so if I'm wrong about that, I would encourage those who that request went to to tell me I'm wrong and that you did send them all over. But I have no emails, no documents, no teams chats, none of the things that I asked for two weeks ago related to this. The reason I did that was that the meeting that we had left me deeply unsatisfied with the answers that came from, where did this come from? Why is it being pursued? And you addressed a little bit of that today, mr. Administrator, but I don't take kindly to what I felt was a reasonable request and was told by the city attorney that that request would be fulfilled and that it has not been 14 days later. So this is a a topic now that I think has been unnecessarily brought to this committee multiple times without a lot of work happening in between. And so it hasn't been well managed, that there is a sense of not wanting to work on through some things. And the meeting that I was brought into was just, frankly, a here's our final solution thing that we want to present. There's nothing else we can do. There was no discussion. There was no let's get some ideas. It was just this is the thing. We'll see you in committee. And that's why that's what spurred my request for this. Because as I understand it, some members of the council president's team and others, perhaps in the city administration's public safety area, have been working on their pet project. But this is certainly not what I was expecting when the chair referred it some months ago. Back for some additional work. So that doesn't necessarily mean that this is, for me, an ordinance dead on arrival, but it certainly on an ordinance where I'm struggling to to make a decision has not ingrained yourself to me. I've asked that we look at this in a way so that we are not doing what I think this ordinance will do will result in more guns being left in cars. That's what I think is going to happen. So I'm just trying to be very clear about that because for those folks who are today following the law by getting a concealed carry permit, and the nature of a concealed carry permit is that no one knows you're carrying, which is the privacy aspect, the public safety aspect, not not being threatening aspect. That's really just fine for those people. And the sheriff has a record of all those folks. This to me, given the number of enforcements that our security agents in this building have noted have occurred in the last five years, and I think it was five was the number is a solution in search of a problem. And I wanted to work through a way in which we could make this a solution in search of making a better something. And yet we haven't been there and I haven't seen the work come and I haven't seen the, the public service safety service area step up in a responsible manner on this. So I'm pretty disappointed. I think that. The the cascading bad decisions comment is one of those where you say, does a guy who looks like me get enforced against more often or less often than a person who doesn't look like me? And I think that this ordinance is waiting deeply into that and not in a great manner. And so I'm thinking about that. And sops are not laws. Sops are internal functions that do not have to be followed by the letter of the law. And so I don't want to lean on the health of this ordinance is on the following of an sop, because the sop is a standard operating procedure. And so for me, that to my colleagues is where my concern relates is that we've been given some. Buffering areas where we think this will help make it better or do this. And I see that. I see the spirit there. But to create a new class of, of activity that is today legal and safe and not something that the city is dealing with in a, in a meaningful way of like, we have this problem we must address, I am I'm confounded com I don't even have the right word. I'm confused about why this has been such a huge effort and I. And again, I put this in somewhat of a pet project category. And that's too bad. And so I. I would love to, to frankly see some of this conversation. I do think that a tabling of this for a much later date and stop bringing it back. Chair, this has been too much bringing it back every couple of weeks with no substantive difference that we take a look at a, at a, at a different time on this, if people are really gung ho about it, but passing something that I believe will be enforced differently against different people based on the circumstances, something I have a lot of caution here and but I do want to hear the rest of the conversation. I know that, you know, councilor Kanal and others and I, we've had these conversations. I want to see where this goes today, but I'm I'm pretty irritated with a two weeks old public records request on this to try and get a sense of where this all came from and what it's about was unfulfilled. So I'll stop there.
118 Thank you. Councilor councilor Kanal.
119 Yeah, I had some, some process questions. So I and I'm not trying to like say anybody did anything wrong backwards looking here necessarily. I'm trying to understand, you know, I think the intention was that that a conversation would occur between a member of council who's not part of this council, council president and up to two of us, because we have a committee quorum issue. If it was more than that, and that that would yield some sort of substantive difference. Can someone explain what exactly happened there? Because I think, I don't know, the specific conversation that happened. I was not one of the two. If any state legislators are listening to this, this this is absurd. So, you know, track that for the public meetings piece. But can we can we get a better understanding of, of what exactly happened? I don't know who was involved in this.
120 Actually. I mean, I thought that originally I'd asked for the administration to, if possible, meet with individual councilors, and I don't know how it actually played out. I wasn't part of one of those meetings. City administrator, can you explain to me who met with who at what times?
121 I don't have the actual dates. I have to rely on staff to actually met with the councilors, to kind of walk through how those individual meetings went with councilors as it relates to the actual time. But I know those meetings did take place. I know councilor Zimmerman kind of referenced kind of how that meeting took place, but I'd have to rely on staff.
122 And staff here to elaborate.
123 Trying to find the date for you.
124 I don't necessarily need the exact dates, but just to understand that if everybody got like, what was the who got one? What was the idea behind it? What was the intent kind of was the question.
125 Yeah. So elizabeth perez, for the record, enterprise services director for public safety, we met a few weeks ago with councilor Zimmerman councilor Morillo, councilor Smith's staff, as well as council president staff. I think evan was there as well to walk through the documents. The ordinance, pb was there, dc hughes as well as manny guerra from security and the psc staff. So me and bree, as well as the city attorney. So that was the conversation where we had where I believe councilor Zimmerman was still unsatisfied with the answers. Thank you.
126 Okay, so. Councilor. Novick and I know briefings, but okay, so I guess first, thanks for being here, director perez, and thanks to everyone for the work that you've been doing on this. I think I'm a little confused and this is maybe less a question for for staff, but maybe, but what was the intention here that we could have an iterative process of figuring out a method of solving some of the underlying concerns? Was that the sort of purpose behind these.
127 I.
128 I don't I yes, that was the purpose. I don't know that we reached that. I mean, clearly we did not reach that.
129 Councilor I think that I at least one of the people suggesting this, because I wanted to spend less time, didn't want to keep on bringing this back to committee. So I was hoping that people would have individual conversations with administrations that would facilitate a speedier resolution of this whole matter.
130 Okay. Councilor Kanal, I think that was the spirit of the chair's direction some months ago. Yeah. What occurred the 31st was a here's our final product. That is the first meeting that has occurred that I was invited to. So the months ago guidance, I think was in good spirit chair everything since then. I would disagree with that. It was a good spirit.
131 Okay. And so I think would it be fair council president then to ask that was this amendment that we just approved, designed to address what was raised there, or was it sort of something that we were something unrelated and we're still trying to address what was raised by councilors on this committee in the in the briefing. And I'm not trying to like, you know, expose the sausage making process too much here, but trying to to understand if there's still more work to do and if so, what are the areas that that's, that are being worked on?
132 I can say that it was written specifically to address concerns, both that were brought up in the meeting, and also additional ones that when mike porter took over from city attorney linda law, who retired, identified a couple of additional ways to strengthen this. So in the briefing, it was discussed the extent to which it solved those concerns, the specific concerns that were brought up.
133 Okay. I think there's there's still underlying things to understand, and I understand this is for a lot of folks who may be listening, this is a simple our guns bad or not kind of vote. And I don't think that's actually what this policy is. It's a there's a lot of nuance to this in a specific sense in terms of differential enforcement as as councilor Zimmerman brought up. But also what are the the, the guardrails. Cully what are the you mentioned in other cities you've worked in that this is something we've already resolved and are the rules.
134 Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. I just had a very brief thing to say to that specifically was. The point I missed to say was that the state law is incredibly inflexible and is incredibly narrow. And so to address some of the underlying concerns that were brought up by this body was simply not possible because it is fundamentally we have very few very little flexibility in terms of what the underlying solutions may be. And so that that is an important component of what the amendment that you all just adopted was then.
135 Then that's fair. And like I said, I think that the amendment itself helped. I just don't know that it addressed the underlying issues that have been raised, some of which I share and some of which I don't. But yeah. Cully do you can you speak to what the rule is in in the other cities you've worked in? Like, what is the in terms of what do we want to see? Not necessarily, you know, you.
136 Know, I'll use dallas because it's a very good comparison to the size and scope and kind of the meeting frequency that we see here in Portland. And you cannot bring any firearms into any dallas city hall or chambers during a government proceeding or court proceeding in a city building, because dallas also has municipal courts as well. And that's typical just the general rule of law as it relates to bringing firearms into city hall. Now, how is that functioning? The city of dallas has its own equipment and building services and security that is in-house. City employees not contracted out that administer that code. So there's metal detectors as you enter city hall. So if it goes off, you have a concealed. They tell you you cannot bring that gun inside the city facility. Now, what they do with the gun after that, we don't know. And that is not something that is policed from that standpoint, but it is managed through having metal detectors, two sets of metal detectors, one, as you enter into building and one as you enter the council chambers.
137 Okay, I appreciate that. And that's texas.
138 It's texas.
139 I mean, you get guns and like happy meals there. Like it's, it's.
140 I wouldn't say all that now.
141 So that's interesting. I appreciate that clarification. I'll let the conversation proceed. I appreciate this. Thanks.
142 Yeah, I put myself in the queue just to say that I am not sure if there's any version of this that could address everybody's concerns. So, I mean, from my perspective, I thought that it was important to make it clear that to have it brought out clearly that nobody's going to be subject to a felony charge and that there is going to be a process and referral to law enforcement last resort. And is the discretion issue. There's always going to be concerns about discretion in enforcing any law, and I'm not sure that we can, you know, ever erase those concerns except other than, you know, we just need we should be keeping an eye on it. So that's in part response to councilor Zimmerman's suggestion that we table this for a future date. I just don't know that there's any further discussion that's going to bring any more clarity.
143 I'd like to move to table this discussion with no date specified.
144 Councilor Zimmerman moves. Do I hear a second.
145 Second.
146 I can't remember. Is there a discussion of a motion to table?
147 No.
148 Okay. In that case, can.
149 I ask a question?
150 Councilor Kanal has a question.
151 Yeah. So would that be a motion to postpone indefinitely.
152 Without without a date? Yes. If it's ready to come back in a future time. Sure. But I don't want to set a date today. I think that's gotten us in a bad rhythm.
153 Okay.
154 In that case, could the clerk call the roll on the on the motion to table or whatever we're calling it?
155 Yes, yes.
156 Just one moment. Okay. So on the motion to table.
157 Is it a motion to table or to postpone indefinitely? They're just very, very different.
158 Yeah. I'm really trying to understand how would this item come come back? If it were to come back, would it be that we have to vote to do it? Would it be that the chair can put it on an agenda if and when it's ready, but is not obligated to do so? What's the and partially what's the the specific vote we're taking? Partially. What's the intent?
159 Sure. I have to ask the clerk to elaborate on that.
160 Sure. If the item is tabled as the motion was originally made, then the committee has to bring it back at the following meeting, or it is basically indefinitely done. It's gone. If the motion is to postpone indefinitely, then it can be brought back either by the chair or by members of the committee making a motion.
161 Councilor Zimmerman, was your intention to have it be the second postponed indefinitely or to table anyway?
162 I think the postponed indefinitely allows us more flexibility for when I'll say if it becomes ready at a future date. But it doesn't mean that, again, we're back here doing it all over again. By your discretion. It sounds like the tabling means either it's next week or it's dead. And I think that wasn't my intention. My intention is bring full products that are ready.
163 Okay. In that case, I'll ask the clerk. The councilor Having intention. Can we treat the motion as a motion to postpone indefinitely and go ahead and vote on it? Do we have to remake the motion?
164 It would be easiest if the councilor Zimmerman would.
165 Withdraw.
166 Withdraw his motion, and make a new motion that would make life easier for me.
167 Thank you.
168 Definitely kills it.
169 Okay. Yeah.
170 Sorry, we're getting conflicting information here. Motion to postpone indefinitely kills the item.
171 Yes.
172 Okay. So so does tabling.
173 So tabling. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Good morning. Beth woodard, city attorney's office. A motion to postpone indefinitely will kill the item. If you would like to lay it on the table, then you will just need a motion later to pick it up. So you can do. If there is no time, certain you can do a motion to lay it on the table. And then when you're ready, you'll just need another motion to take it off the table.
174 I'm going to keep my original motion because that is more reflects my intent here.
175 Okay.
176 Thank you, thank you, thank you. Chair.
177 Okay. Can we proceed? Can clerk call the roll on the motion to table or lay on the table?
178 Okay. Motion to lay it on the table. Kanal. I Morillo. Know Zimmerman. I Smith. I Novick. Know with three eyes and two nays. The motion to lay the item on the table has been approved.
179 Thank you. And now let's have a a 13 minute break. And before moving on to the next item, reconvene at 1130. Reluctant to start a brand new substantive discussion with everybody here. So I'm going to give councilor Kanal another minute, but then we'll start. All right. Everybody is back in session. The clerk read the next item.
180 Item number four, document number 2026-332. Amend prohibited. Conduct code to update ejections and exclusions for drug possession, weapons, weapons possession and abuse in parks. Amend code chapter 20.12.
181 Thank you.
182 Counselor Zimmerman and staff. Take it away.
183 Thank you chair. Thanks to the colleagues. I'm bringing forward this ordinance in this proposal for discussion with you all today and interested in your process and thoughts here, if we could. I've got my staff in front as well, but I'm going to talk through our presentation first. I'll start with the problem. There's a continued frustration among portlanders with the use of dangerous drugs and the weapons that we see in parks and these kind of controlled substances like fentanyl and heroin. We know they're very addictive. We know they're very toxic, can result, of course, in behavior problems in our parks. I think that many of us have probably seen the examples or we've seen ourselves, or we've talked to neighbors who are seeing the paraphernalia that is left in parks. When drugs become the thing you do in parks. And we often hear about what are the tools that we have to help with this. And so from that perspective, we're bringing forward this safe park ordinance. I want to talk about just a little bit in terms of what tools do law enforcement today have when they face somebody in one of our parks who's being violent or has is using illicit drugs in the park what exists today? So of course, they can issue a warning to an individual. They can eject that individual from the park, and they can exclude the individual from the park for a set number of days. And then, of course, because a lot of this is also illegal activity, they always do have the ability to arrest that individual or cite them in more of the judicial side. I want to be clear what we're talking about when we say exclusions is more of an administrative side of things than it is a judicial side. That's an important piece here. If we go to the next slide, the goals today, it really is about making our parks safer for every portlander, every visitor. It's also to refine and give some of our public safety folks, including our park rangers, some tools to kind of keep illegal and dangerous behavior out of our parks, and that when we actually enforce against such things, that we have the ability to improve the situation, not just that in that moment, but in the days to come to update the process in for how park exclusions are issued, and to protect the reputation and continued enjoyment of one of, I think, portland's greatest assets, which are parks. So next slide there. Okay, so as it currently sits, we have some exclusion parameters and certain number of days. What this ordinance does is that it increases the minimum length of exclusions for elevated violations from 60 days to 90 days. And so I want to be clear, this is not making any activity, any new activity illegal. This is not making any old activity illegal. This is just saying what's on the books of extending from 60 to 90. So that includes violent crimes, sexual crimes, types of crimes that are under ors163. Of course, rape, assault, murder, stalking, child abuse, elder abuse, abuse of animals, mental illness and disability. I'm sorry I said I said animals. I'm sorry. I meant I'm reading too many things here. Intimidation, property, damage to park at least $1,000, abuse of adults with mental illness and developmental disabilities and other types of of abuse. What we're proposing here is also increasing the minimum length of exclusions from 30 days to 90 days for drug possession and sale and transportation, solicitation or distribution and weapons possession. So what is currently a 30 day exclusion in those groups of crimes that I just described, moving those to 90, which is similar to the last group, drug possession, sale, transportation, solicitation, distribution, these are drugs that are covered include toxic and dangerous substances like fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, as defined by ors 475. We're also adding counterfeit substances, which is a new list for me. That's just a definition to get around some of what's happening in the drug market for people creating new things and making different claims. But really what it's getting at is it's controlled substances or anything in that container that's purposely made to imitate a manufacturer or distributor other than who can legally manufacture or distribute. An example of that would be someone made a fake label for a prescription drug like oxycodone. I'll put this in the category of nuances that we were asked to include, because we're seeing that come up as a way people try to squirrel out of accountability. I want to be really clear that this does not include legally owned or purchased marijuana, legally owned or purchased purchase prescriptions. We're really talking about the illicit hardcore drugs right now, weapons possession. This includes, but is not limited to any firearm, pellet gun, spring loaded weapon, stun gun, etc. I have a picture here of a machete. I was at a neighborhood event one time where a police officer was nearby and took a machete off of a off of a patron in the park, and that was the end of the interaction, right? Take take the machete. But there's nothing else. There's no there there after, after the fact. And I want to be clear that this does not include legally carried concealed weapons, just to be consistent to my colleagues. All right. Going on to the next slide. There we go. What you see here is three different levels or three versions of offenses. A tiered system which which does exist already. But this is a bit of a refine here, a tiered system that allows for the policy to focus on chronic offenders of elevated violations who create the greatest threat and disruption. So mostly we're talking about is that that first violation of the things that I've outlined is a 90 day exclusion from the park. The second offense, within a three year period, that that person would be excluded from all parks within that park service zone for 180 days. And the third offense in three years is a person excluded from all parks in the city for 365 days. So not only do we go longer, but we also expand. If a person continues to violate within a three year period, we expand not just the park from which it occurred, but to the broader sense of parks. And so we see this map here when I talk about park service zones. This is this is, I think, a helpful description of what we're what we're talking about. Actually, go back just a bit, please. I want to I want to highlight this, given the nature of how things go on today, if you interact with a person at a park and we disrupt a behavior, the goal isn't that they just stop doing it at that one park or leave that one park and then walk to the next one and then have no accountability. But we want to give them the opportunity to do the right thing. But if they continue to violate a second and third time, you do see that we can expand and say, the parks in this area, clearly you're using this area as kind of home base for for bad behavior. So we want to pull that away, but that doesn't come in until you're into your second or third offense. Okay. Moving into the next piece, I want to just clarify where exclusions apply. This includes the park and city property or right of way, which is adjacent to the park, including walkways, pathways, sidewalks and streets. I think of this as areas from which that person and their behavior still has impact upon the park. And so just stepping off the grass into the sidewalk may not have a meaningful change. And so that's what we're seeing here. It it creates an exemption, of course, for any person who's just passing through the area. If you're walking through going to work, going to school, whatever that is, that this does not interrupt that and make it just means that the behavior in which you were excluded for means you cannot just hang out in the park in a recreational way in which we, I think we all understand, but the passing through is remain protected for all individuals. Next slide please. This encourages a bit more of a consistent approach to exclusions if an authorized park officer. So that's PPB and our park rangers engages with someone who's engaged in prohibited activity. And the officer does not issue an exclusion, then we're looking to have them document why they did not issue an exclusion. I think that this helps us ensure that the officers are educated on the available tools, encourages a more consistent approach, and gathers data on effectiveness and impact of a policy change. Portland police bureau and Portland parks and recreation would establish a process to document that information so that it would not to be too burdensome. That's not our goal here. But safe parks does not require, and it does not mandate any such exclusions. I want to be really clear about that. Officers retain the discretion that they have today to make the decision on the factors on the ground. Each park is different. Each group of people are different. These violations are different, and we're not changing anything with their current today practices. Going to the next slide. This does close a loophole that I believe is one of the reasons that we're not seen as effective of exclusionary use. So right now, if someone appeals an exclusion to the city's hearings, officer, that exclusion is automatically stayed by the city's hearing officer until the appeal is decided. The automatic stay of an exclusion lets the offender return immediately to the park, from which they were excluded. I'm identifying that as one of the bigger concerns. The safe park ordinance eliminates the automatic stain of a park exclusion. The city's hearing officer can still stay a decision on a case by case basis, but it goes through that process. There's no automatic stay just because an appeal was filed. Safe parks does not eliminate the ability to stay executions. The exclusions the city hearings officer can still stay an exclusion through the appeals process. The safe parks does not eliminate or create obstacles to file an appeal, and a person who is excluded from a park can still appeal the decision and get a second review. I also think that this gives our city council some more oversight of an exclusion process that is not largely something we see much of now. It requires that pb and nr report to council one year after the enactment. The report allows council to track implementation and provide transparency and provides transparency on the process. The report will outline the number of exclusions, locations which violations triggered the process for which officers used to document a summary of the reasons why exclusions perhaps were not issued, and information on how officers enforce a violation of the exclusion order. So what we're really talking about here is there is criminal activity that an officer may cite a person for. What we're saying is, in a lot of those cases, we'd like them to be considering the other tool, which is a park exclusion at the same time. But the other side of this is that exclusions can be used without the citation for criminal, right. This is this balance that folks have to use. And I think that it's one of the tools that offers a, a non-judicial option to counter some behavior. And it says that if you're, if you think it's serious enough that you're using using the legal process, then why are you not also taking a look at the exclusion? So just kind of trying to pair those up a little bit better than I think we currently are in practice. So in summary, with the next slide here, this sets a 90 day minimum exclusion for elevated violations including drug and weapons offenses. It increases the escalating impact of exclusions for repeated elevated violations. It clarifies where exclusions apply, ensuring safety and usability of adjacent city property and right of way. It encourages consistent approach to exclusions requiring documentation when exclusion is not issued. Closes a loophole that lets offenders return quickly to parks, eliminating the automatic stays for appeals, and gives council more oversight of the exclusion process. Directing that report to be delivered to council. So I wanted to bring this forward to the body for consideration. Given that, I think in all of our districts, we've encountered some level of frustration over dealing with a problem in the park and that that takes form in different parts of each district. But I do think that we have an exclusion process in the city that can be used more effectively. I also believe that it is a tool that is a step down from the more. Legal enforcement of certain things, and could have an impact in a way of sending a message and setting a new behavioral change without including judicial. But at the same time, if we're going to be doing a judicial that we make sure we're also taking care of of the park, the park users and saying, if you're getting caught doing this stuff, you can't start coming back the next day and trying to interrupt that behavior. And that's where we see that 90 day. So I do appreciate chair, you getting this on the agenda, and I would welcome the discussion. Thank you.
184 Thank you, councilor Smith.
185 Thank you, mr. Chair. Thank you, councilor Zimmerman. I can appreciate what you're what I think that communities of color will be targeted to have longer stays out of the parks and being able to use our facilities. And for good or bad, I think there I you know, I've heard about some things that have happened in parks, but I just don't support the idea of putting extended. You know. I think it's divisive. And I and I think it hurts communities and particularly communities of color. And so I won't be supporting this.
186 Thank you. Councilor, it occurs to me, I think, that we have some public testimony folks signed up, right?
187 Yes we do.
188 Are you? So we should probably do the usual. Let's have, you know, clarify technical and clarifying questions. Then we'll move to public testimony and then to broader debate. Councilor Kanal.
189 Thank you to counselor Zimmerman and team for working on this. Bring it forward. As I'm reading this, I had a question around the expansion of the geography of it, of ejections and exclusions to include the adjacent city property and the right of way. Does that mirror the authority and jurisdiction of park rangers? There's been questions that have been raised to my office that the answer has been very difficult to to get and convey back as to if can you do the like, step in, step out of a park onto the sidewalk? And whose jurisdiction is it is the anticipation that that park rangers would be able to do the additional work, which, if it's the same person, doesn't feel like much additional work of saying, actually the sidewalk is not okay as well. Or would this by necessity require bringing in a different responder to that situation?
190 I'm going to start with what I hope my philosophy can be about. It is that such silly lines are not drawn right, that if if a person who works for our parks rangers knows that something's impacting the park from just a few inches off the grass, that we don't get into some line of, oh, that's mine, that's yours, this is ours, etc. Because nobody in the city of Portland cares. What they care about is the city of Portland is taking action. And so whether that's a police officer, a ps3, or a park ranger, they're all city of Portland employees. So that's that's the philosophy from which I would like to get to, because I don't think that these lines of demarcation are actually very helpful to the public, and they're not very helpful to. Having a functional city program. And I then I will follow that up with, I'm not exactly sure what the standard today is when it comes to differentiating the work and where it goes. And I think if those lines do exist, that I'd be all for working out how to eliminate this. I can't work across the line idea because I just think that's nonfunctional.
191 Yeah. I would also just say it relates to the how dispatch works. That piece in terms of, let's say I'm called three one in the remaining hours it has or 911. And how that gets done, because I, I, I have been told, and I've personally had the experience of debating whether to make the call based on where a situation is occurring and based on who the responder might be.
192 This, this is a really important point. Councilor. And I really appreciate that the what you're highlighting is that some of the exclusion stuff, right? So what can be enforced by a park ranger is very different than what can be enforced by a Portland police officer. And I would like our rangers to be able to kind of take ownership of that park situation in a way that doesn't have to involve always a legal and judicial situation. And the next piece of this is that if police are involved, you know, I think that for a lot of these, they they have the same ability as park rangers, but because they mostly spend their time in the in the sighting and arresting world, like that's where their thoughts are at. But actually, I think the exclusion that the rangers spend their time in marrying those up a bit would be helpful. But it's an important like how do you dispatch kind of thing, but stopping a park ranger just because the sidewalk isn't their jurisdiction seems nonfunctional to me.
193 Okay, thanks for that clarification. The other question I had was, I just want to make sure I'm reading this right on page 19 and it goes into 20. There's an area that relates to the automatic stay that's been removed from the code. This is section I. I can't see the scroll all the way up here. The 20.1 12.265 I, and I just wanted to make sure I was understanding correctly that the. The idea here is that text previously said there's an automatic stay unless it's in dishman, east Portland community center, etc. And now you're saying there's not there's just no automatic where there wouldn't be an automatic stay for those locations.
194 I'm trying to catch up here.
195 Yeah. Sorry.
196 Can you say again where.
197 You're working? It's at the bottom of page 19 of exhibit a. And it's section I.
198 So your question again.
199 Yeah. Just just making sure I understand correctly that basically right now it's automatically stayed unless it's in these locations that are enumerated in subsections one through whatever. And this is now saying, and those would not be automatically stayed and your change would make it just not automatically stayed, period.
200 Across the board.
201 Okay. That's the clarification part. Thank you.
202 Thank you, counselor.
203 Councilor. Morillo.
204 Thank you. Are we just doing technical questions or.
205 Yes, I think there's not much public testimony, but there's a couple folks.
206 Okay, I'll keep it brief. I think this might be for you, but maybe for park staff as well. How did you speak with parks about this proposal or with liuna? How long did they have to process this and did they have any feedback on it?
207 I'm going to actually have my staff talk about their work with parks bureau and anyone else.
208 With councilor Zimmerman.
209 For the record, we engaged with the administration extensively with parks and recreation, with PPB and the city attorney's office, and they're all in the room as well. To answer any technical questions, if you have specifics.
210 Okay, great. I think I'll hold off until we move into discussion
211 So folks can testify.
212 Thank you. Counselor. The clerk want to call the public. The folks signed up for public testimony.
213 Certainly, we have three people signed up for testimony. Nick g, liu s and Ryan s, and Ryan is online. Ryan, if you want to unmute and begin your testimony while if there's anybody in the room wants to come up. Thank you.
214 Good afternoon everyone. I guess it's still good morning. Almost afternoon. I apologize in advance. I'm in an office where the video camera is not quite synced up to where I am, so I'm going to be waving my arm while I'm talking. Ryan sotomayor, business manager of laborers local 43. I appreciate the amendment being brought forward. I think in its intent to help. With safety and parks. I also appreciate councilor Smith's concerns about how this will be utilized. I have a lot of concerns about this, and I know our members do as well. And questions about does this extend to community centers? When I went through and listened to the slides that you're talking about, councilor Zimmerman, see violent crimes, child abuse, elder abuse, abuse of adults with mental illness and developmental disabilities, intimidation, weapons and drugs. And the discussion about the ping pong of people going from one part to another part to another part. So the safety things that happen in parks always extend to community centers. The same people that struggle with drug use in the parks make their way to community centers, to use restrooms, to use shower facilities, to sometimes try to push their product. The people with machetes are not just in the park, they're also in community centers. Right now, there is not a safety plan in place for staff at community centers to exclude or acknowledge them other than calling park rangers. So someone walking around in a restroom with a machete, there is no recourse for staff to exclude them unless park rangers see it. And so I just have a lot of questions about purpose, focus. I'm also pretty frustrated that park rangers weren't reached out to seasonal park rangers, park technicians, facility maintenance.
215 Worker in.
216 The room.
217 Recreation staff, park staff. We're continually told that the city wants to make the city of Portland to be a place to work and an employer of choice. And when employees bring forth safety concerns. It feels like we're not listened to. Feels like we're not acknowledged, and it feels like we aren't brought into the conversation to help develop any type of plan that is going to need to be enforced by people that are front facing staff. So thank you for your time and consideration.
218 And that concludes testimony.
219 All right. Any discussion? Councilor Kanal.
220 Yeah.
221 First.
222 This is such a fascinating agenda today. These three things together have actually, you know, I think in the last item, we were talking a lot and councilor Zimmerman brought up the differential enforcement possibility and had an interesting conversation with with chair Novick about that. And I think that's something that is really fascinating. I appreciate everything that councilor Smith said. That's sort of my starting point on this, too. I think there's a lot of interesting things here as I go through this. The the my question around park rangers was really about who's responsible, because I think one of the challenges is, is I don't want to inadvertently what already exists. And then what would be added the nexus of that be that because we're expanding the, the, the geography of this that we're forced to bring in police. So I want to dig into that a little bit more. Because that that is both a problem for the differential enforcement possibility, but also a problem from the perspective of what we were talking about in the other agenda item of the workload that we're expecting to, to staff to, and I think we shouldn't be expanding low acuity type of things into the police workload. So that's what I'm trying to just understand a little bit better and see if that is what's happening or not. We had a really interesting item a few months ago from councilor from chair Novick, where the the actual changes to the code around the nuisance properties that councilor Novick was proposing was less the issue than what already existed. And I'm trying to understand that as well here because I as I'm going through it, I had a couple big questions, but a lot of this makes sense. And I think, you know, adding counterfeit substances makes makes sense to me completely. I think adding pedestrian plazas as a place that we're looking. If you've been excluded from a pedestrian plaza before that, that's relevant makes sense as well. And I could go down the list and talk about several of these things. When you get lower in the the document, I think the I mentioned the one concern, which comes up in a few different places and how they work together. The other question I had was about the sort of workload issue with relation to. It's now c three in the middle of. Page 16. The requirement that you document why you didn't do it. And I just wanted to understand that a little bit better. As well, I will say real quick to the testimony when I have seen the, the, when I've gone on tours and met with some of our parks and recreation employees, which I did as a member of the parks board before I was a counselor, as well as. Now I have said that I have heard sorry that there has been a desire for a safety plan for a very long period of time that helps with. Frontline employees who are at a fixed location, because park rangers, my understanding is there's 29 still something like that. I think we had a small expansion authorized, but I don't know how many of them have been hired. Is anyone here from is vicente here or anyone else?
223 Yes.
224 Oh, hi. Can you let us know how many park rangers we currently have versus authorized? Sorry I didn't see you behind the pillars in the corner there.
225 Vicente harrison, health safety emergency manager with Portland parks and recreation. Thank you again to the committee for being here today. City administrator, just to answer your question directly before any further remarks. Currently, we have 29 permanent park ranger positions, and we have another 11 seasonal positions that we bring on during peak season, which is the summer.
226 Okay. And then, director pearce, I see you're here to thank you both for being here. Vicente, I almost didn't recognize you out of the uniform. You're always. I see you out and about so often, so I appreciate your work in general as well as being here. Director pearce, how many parks assets, how many physical locations are there?
227 You know, I don't have that figure off the top of my head. A lot.
228 Significantly more than 29, right?
229 For sure.
230 And so even if all park rangers were on 24 over seven and never took a break or had to sleep, which obviously is not a thing, but even if that was true, we'd have geographies that are not covered at any given moment and a lot of them. And so I think that's a part of this that is not that I shouldn't we we can't say that that's a weakness of the ordinance because it's not about the code, but it is sort of a an adjacent question of if we're doing this, are we really adding work to a entity that doesn't have the staffing and what's the plan then? I 29 is, is ludicrously low, in my opinion. I believe there was a plan to have it near 80 that was suggested a year to year and a half ago, if I recall correctly. I heard about it. And that seems like and we're having this conversation on another issue earlier today with psr, how fast can you scale up a program? And I, I hope that that the administration is coming up with a way to do it as fast as possible. Understanding that it's not going to be perfect on day one, and I don't want to hold you to like, well, we authorized 80 positions. Why aren't there 80 people today that are fully trained on July 2nd or something? But that's the, the, the piece of this that I'm trying to understand. So. I want to first just give you a chance to respond, and then I'm going to let I hear what my colleagues are talking about as we go forward. But thanks.
231 Yeah. So just a general response to the work that is being done today. I'm just share those remarks. And then I can, you know, follow up on the question that you had in terms of the potential of scaling up the program. So Portland parks and recreation have received the initial proposal for potential title, title 20 updates for discussion and further review. And our leadership is committed to collaborating with public safety leadership. The Portland police bureau, elected officials and other city partners to identify sustainable and effective ways to improve public safety in Portland. Pr will continue to evaluate the potential title 20 updates, ensuring all proposed changes are properly reviewed and vetted in accordance with the bureau's and city's established processes and core values, as with previous code updates, this review will include input from key stakeholders such as pr, equity team staff, public safety leadership, the city attorney's office, the parks director, our deputy city administrator, the city administrator, and other relevant city partners. Public input and community perspectives are important to Portland parks and should be considered as appropriate stages during the city's evaluation of potential changes to title 20 code. This vetted process has enabled our past success in being thoughtful, sustainable, legally sound, practical, and aligns with the city's commitment to public safety, equity and responsible stewardship of Portland parks. So in terms of directly scaling up our program, right now we're at 29 and that's all we're funded for is for 29. With the seasonal budget to bring on additional. If there was an opportunity to scale up the program, that would be how we've done in the past successfully with stagger that approach. So we would likely bring on, you know, at least 6 to 8 rangers. There's an annual ranger academy that we would like them to go through that takes place every March that all rangers go through in order for them to be properly prepared to go out and safely patrol our parks and serve our staff as well as the public, so that that's the answer to that. And just in addition, in terms of the property. So we have about 12 community centers. We have a 12000 acres approximately of park land and over 144 developed parks. So 29 rangers are across a 24 hour shift or excuse me, a 24 hour work period, seven days a week. So at any given time, we have about 6 to 8 rangers for the entire city on. And that's on at the at the very best outcome.
232 Councilor. Aye, Morillo.
233 Thanks, chair. Novick. Thank you guys so much for being here today to talk to us about this. So I think there was some conflicting information earlier, and I'm curious for parks and for the rangers. How were you consulted on this policy? Were you given time to give feedback? And I think particularly on the modifications to chapter 20?
234 Absolutely. There was some preliminary discussions in terms of this. So we were consulted. That didn't expand to the degree that we would like it to do in terms of all of our staffing and making sure we're getting input from our leadership and other key stakeholders. But the consultation did take place, and we were able to talk about these potential changes.
235 Gotcha. Who were some of the folks that you're hoping to bring into the discussion in your ideal world?
236 I mean, ideally, you know, our equity team is is when we've updated title 20 in the past, these are the kind of the milestones that we look to the equity team, obviously, our ppe and our leadership, which is our division managers and the staff that report to them, which is a lot of our field and community center staff, our city attorney's office, of course. And I think that this this has been going through our city attorney's office, which is good. Our parks director in dc a. And obviously that will go up to our city administrator as well. And then other city partners, we would like to, you know, just get city feedback in terms of the community that we serve. That user experience is important to parks. It's what we want people. We want them to have a valued experience when they enter our spaces. So their feedback is very key. So those are just a few.
237 Gotcha. As far as your individual feedback, what was some of the initial feedback that you gave, and did you see it integrated into the policy?
238 Yeah, the initial feedback we we gave was, you know, a lot of conversation in terms of the theory of what this potential is. Obviously, as park rangers non-sworn officers, we work in collaboration and partnership with Portland police in terms of really making sure that we're able to address some of the crimes that are in parks. Code is one thing, and I think a lot of the things that we've talked about today are crimes that are taking place in parks. And we we really would value the police support in that regard. And we've had success in the past and currently are working with police in terms of joint patrols, targeting certain areas that we know the public has let us know that they've identified crime in. So we could address at our level the potential for expanding beyond the park zone is something that is definitely something for more consideration, because there's just jurisdictional lines that we can't cross in terms of what the rangers are responsible for. So within within parks, property is where our jurisdiction ends. But as we go into the roadway and in public sidewalks, there's other conversations in terms of those entities being able to, you know, work with rangers on what our authority would be for activity in those. And currently what we do now is we refer when a ranger just doesn't end when they leave the park, but we refer those situations to the proper folks so that they're aware and they can take action as necessary.
239 Okay, so I'm hearing some, you know, general feedback. Was there something specific that you wanted modified? I'm hearing maybe some conflict about the sidewalk aspect of it and that being outside of jurisdiction, are there specific things that you wished, you know, were in the proposal or integrated?
240 You know, again, I think just a, a fully vetted process in terms of just making sure we hear back from our staff. You know, I don't want to speak for our staff in terms of their how this impacts their work and how they come to work and feel like they are safe to perform their duties. So I think that is just an important piece that, you know, we would want to see. But there, there and again, with our equity team is just a very another element because parks are the most diverse places in the city, everybody convenes there. And we would want to make sure that we are able to support our citizens from an equitable standpoint in terms of this code update.
241 Thank you so much. I really appreciate you. You know, not everyone always thinks about bringing their frontline staff in, and I really appreciate that you have that perspective and that you're trying to get those folks there, because often the frontline folks know exactly what's happening on the ground that the rest of us don't. And I do agree with councilor Smith's earlier comments around the potential negative impacts on different communities who are going to be overpoliced, you know, rather than than other people. I would definitely love to have a briefing with frontline staff. I don't know if that happens at committee or if it happens individually for us, but I would love to get more of that perspective really fleshed out about what it's going to look like to change this enforcement and from the equity team as well. So perhaps that's something me and the chair can work on to either bring that to as a discussion to committee or individually. Trying to see if I have any more questions. And were the unions who represent the rangers consulted on this as well, or is that are those some of the folks that you would want to bring in as well?
242 Well, since we didn't necessarily lead this process, that would be something for councilor Zimmerman staff to answer. I'm not certain.
243 So yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Well, it sounds like we need more extensive. Process with frontline staff regardless. And I heard from the person who testified for liuna that I think they wanted to be a part of that process as well. I think I will pause there, see if my other colleagues have anything else to add.
244 Councilor Zimmerman.
245 Thank you. Aside from the sidewalk thing, I'm a little bit confused by some of the discussion here. So what is it about the current? Because the only thing that's really changing here is after a park ranger writes an exclusion, which means their job is done, that the automatic stay process doesn't occur. And actually that's it. That is the only change for a day to day work. From a park ranger perspective. That would change is the stay is no longer automatic because the other changes, just taking what's already on the books and saying it's going from 30 to 90 or from 60 to 90. So I don't want to throw around certain words without meeting here. So I don't know what you mean when you bring up some of this stuff. I also would be cautious about, you know, when a, when a counselor's office reaches out to a management. We are it's encompassing upon management to have that first line perspective versus me reaching down to speak to individuals. So I want to be real cautious here with what we're saying. But what I don't understand, and I would like to, because I actually. Colleagues, I want to be real transparent. The sidewalk extension piece is one of those of if that's not going to work, I think we pull it right. I want to be real transparent about that. I think we pull it, but the this idea that somehow this is this grand change because it's like a whopping five things, 30 turns into 90, 60 turns into 90, automatic stay is eliminated. So I don't want this to be too much bigger than what it is. And I think that the idea that, mr. Administrator, that I would reach down into your employee base to write it with the with an employee versus writing with your managers is a strange standard. But if there is something that I'm missing, by all means let me know, but I. But I want to the the idea about where this is enforced and how it's enforced is incredibly important, and I value that part of this discussion. So I want to just talk about a couple of places. Dawson wilkes, columbia slew trail, northwest powerhouse, ventura, gateway, east holladay, lincoln. Cherry city, cully. Whittaker. Sacajawea, kumquat. Peninsula, farragut. Matt, dishman and lilly albina. The number of exclusions that occurred at that list of places was 16, and it was at this last year there. I'm looking at my staff this last year. Okay, 16 out of 16. 11 of those exclusions were for things that don't fall into this category. They were other types of exclusions, the non elevated type. So we're really talking about four that would have fallen into this category. And that is out of a total. So 16 out of a total of 257 in exclusions that existed across the city park and infrastructure. And it looks like community centers. So I say that because how and where things are, are, are enforced and where exclusions have existed. I think that there has been a lot of work to make sure that folks are being quite careful and quite transparent, and also using it judiciously, but the majority are happening in other in, in parts of the city. I think a lot of this is probably downtown. What I heard from folks is, what is the point of an exclusion if they automatically it stayed. So why would I write it? So this is one of those where you hear that and you go, okay, we can work on a tool to give public safety this thing. So. Okay. Got it. I still am missing like what this crux is about, about what changes for the interaction between the officer or the park ranger and the person. I'm not, I'm not understanding that, but we don't want to have things on our books that are not seen as worth of doing. If they are automatically stayed or there's a change there. So but I do to the colleagues, I just want to say like the sidewalk thing, if that has to come off, if there's amendments, those are things that I think are worthy of discussion. Our attempt in expanding in those areas was just to improve what looked like a broken system. But if those are not functional, I'm happy to hear that discussion and move those out in a future reading. So thank you, chair.
246 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Kanal. And by the way, councilor. Aye, Morillo and I both have to leave at 1230 on the dot.
247 Okay.
248 Has the parks board been consulted on this by any chance?
249 And maybe I'll jump in. I also I just want to respond a little bit to councilor Zimmerman's question. I think there's some process clarity that maybe is, at least for me, this is a new process in terms of how we're producing code amendments. When in 2019, when the last time the parks updated that it was run by parks, there was a series of steps that parks went through in terms of public feedback and all those steps. This is coming from a council office, and it isn't wasn't at least eminently clear to me. We were moving from an informal consultation into a formal process of feedback and review. And so I think part of what we are saying is, at least the convention has been when when a bureau is running these processes, there's a series of steps and fuller consultation. And so I think we may be clearly we're moving into that process now, and we can help with that process. In terms of consultations, both with staff, there would be no expectation it would not be appropriate for you to directly consult with staff. I think the question is, what step in this journey are we on? When are we moving to a more formal dialog around this, and how can we be in support of that? I think in general, we are supportive of this proposal. It's more about just process clarity about how do we work on this process together. And no, the parks board met last week and we we did not bring this as an item. So. Right.
250 Okay. I guess just because I have the floor, I think process clarity is good. And I also agree, we've been told many times it's not appropriate for us to call like, you know, the front desk of, of a community center. So if you are one of the people who works at the front desk of a community center are wondering why that hasn't happened. We've gotten a lot of don't do that over, over time. So I think that that makes sense. I think it'd be helpful for us to know, like what, what's a reasonable timeline as well? And we can follow up there. I'd love to know what the parks board thinks, just personally, as I mentioned, a former member of it, but I think that that's just kind of helpful. General clarity. The for me there, I can go through and I'm happy to follow up with with councilor Zimmerman about the stuff here that is like, this might be a challenge. This seems really awesome. And here's things that if I have this other information, would be helpful for me. The pedestrian plaza piece. And this is just to clarify the exclusions there are done by by PBOT as well. Right. And so I'm curious how the information would be shared as an implementation question that I don't think.
251 We'd love to.
252 Have done that. We actually made a decision to not muddy the water given the code issue there, but that was in our early discussions of it actually makes sense because it kind of walks like a park, functions as a park, but is a PBOT asset. So I made that decision not to include it in this time, not for a reason that we didn't think it would be a good. It just that we were focused on parks this time, but accurate.
253 And in terms of your what you're changing, that makes sense. I'll note that I was asking more from the perspective of when you're looking at. Have they is this the first offense, second offense, third offense. You're also now looking at pedestrian plazas as an earlier. The first or second to determine if this is the second or third. And so I'm curious how the information flow is going to come from PBOT over here. But what I'm what I'm also hearing is I think it's time that we have the conversation about what is the park's park ranger program's jurisdiction, not only geographically, but also in terms of what you can do. And obviously, vicente is somebody who should be at the center of that conversation as part of this process. Because I think you're right, the pedestrian plazas walk like a park and talk like a park and probably should be ranged. I don't think you guys use that term, but should be served by the park ranger program in the long run. Not tomorrow. But, you know, at as part of this conversation. And so I'm curious about that. But that's, that's a piece that I think we should dig into more over time. Thanks.
254 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. So I have a question both for you, vicente, and for and for the police folks who are here. I think councilor Kanal mentioned this earlier, the requirement that there be a documentation of why an exclusion wasn't issued. Are people concerned that that might be a workload issue, or does that seem like something that's not really a problem?
255 I'll let police go first and then I can.
256 Good morning. Chris burley, Portland police captain at north precinct. I appreciate the question. Councilor Novick. This has been a point of conversation. I've spoken with councilor Zimmerman's staff about it. There would likely be a cost in us identifying creating some type of template so we could pull data, you know, with any unfunded mandate. Right now, the way things are, it makes it very difficult. It is also a time constraint on our officers, our call response times, as was discussed by deputy chief hughes earlier and brought up by some of you, is nowhere near where we want it. And so this would be another, you know, requirement of our officers to write a report or finish a template. And I attempted to reach out to staff at the police bureau to kind of find out how much they thought that might cost. However, I haven't heard back on doing how much that would cost.
257 Thank you again. Councilor Novick for the question. So the currently within the program, this documentation is taking place. It's not a direct tally, if you will. So when a ranger makes contact that that is documented in their daily data. That's their daily report. If there if there isn't an exclusion issued, there may be a special report associated or a subject of interest report because the individual just walked away. This is why one of the things that is in this proposal that we do support is the removal of the stayed because that would give us, when we do get contact information of the individual that we're excluding, that would give us immediate remedy for the park. But the tallying, so to speak, of why and why not? It's it's it's challenging. And there's an equity component. And I'll just share an example. If we are dealing with someone downtown per se, that is drinking on outside, right? That's, that's a, you know, what would sound like an excludable offense? You know, obviously there's more detail based upon the contact. We have these same situations happening at peninsula park rose garden, where we have folks that are out, a couple having a bottle of wine on a picnic blanket. Now, would we have the same standard there to issue an exclusion for somebody in those situations? So there's always more when you're dealing with the front line situation in the information that you're gathering concerning what the condition is. So I don't know necessarily if if that understanding why or why not, we didn't take that enforcement action would tell a story that would be useful. But we do document those currently now within our daily reports, whether it's a special report, an incident report, whether it's a damage report, a vandalism associated. So so that's how answer that question.
258 Chair, can I just clarify something? The great, great example that the director just, just gave. But that's, that's actually not what the. The need to document is about. It's not if you look across the park and you maybe see something, you make a choice in your head not to deal with it, that doesn't require it. What this is so, so good example. And I want to make sure that the rangers don't they understand that that's not what we're talking about, really. This is about this is about a lot of your officers, captain. So you you make an arrest. So we've already got you in the we're doing reports. We're doing we're taking the time to arrest a person. What we're saying is that if then the arrest for what is also an excludable is not excluded, is there the possibility to make a note in that report of. Chose not to exclude for this reason, etc. And I'm sure there are very good valid reasons why. Perhaps. But that wouldn't apply if there was no interaction, no arrest, no. And that's why it wouldn't really. In that example, I want to just clarify that because that's some nuance. But that was a perfect example. And then I am captain, I'm hearing you loud and clear on this report piece. And colleagues, I would put that also in the category of. Willing to hear more about and what's functional or nonfunctional if there was an amendment to it. But that's how I wanted to describe that. It's more we're already making an arrest. Why wouldn't we also do this? Because that helps. Then the rangers later on to be like, you've been excluded, right? You got arrested for drugs in public. You got to have an exclusion. Now, that's what that's our intent here.
259 Councilor Morillo. Sorry.
260 Thank you. I know we're almost at time and. Councilor. Novick. And I have to leave right at 1230. So I just wanted to put a question that I want on the record for future discussion, if you could bring it. Basically, I just feel like I need a lot more understanding on why this code change makes sense as a solution, especially given a lot of the risks that councilor Smith laid out earlier. So if the bureau could get us more data on how many exclusions the bureau issued in the last few years, how many of those were appealed, reversed, how many were for conduct that's currently listed on the e dot two a list, and how many contacts that ended in a warning or ejection instead of exclusion, and what standards there are for that decision making. Sorry, I threw a lot of questions out at you, but it's recorded so you can look at it later or I will email it to whoever would like. But I think those are some of the questions that I would want answered for the follow up discussion. And thank you so much for your time today.
261 Thank you. Councilor Morillo thanks, everybody, for, I think, a valuable initial discussion of this proposal. And now this meeting of the community and public safety committee is adjourned.