Portland city council president on 100 days of the new form of government

Portland has been operating with a 12-member city council and district representation for more than 100 days now.

Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney is responsible for setting council meeting agendas and referring items proposed by the mayor or city auditor to votes. Among other things, the council has wrestled with the city’s noise code, the permit for Zenith energy, rent pricing software and when exactly public testimony should be heard.

Pirtle-Guiney joins us to talk about the challenges and successes of the new city council so far.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPD. I’m Dave Miller. It’s been about 100 days since the newly expanded Portland City Council took office. Elana Pirtle-Guiney is the council president. She represents District 2, which includes all of North and most of Northeast Portland. In an op-ed in the Oregonian about six weeks ago, she was clear-eyed about the many challenges the city faces. ‘Like our neighboring jurisdictions and counties,’ she wrote, ‘We face unprecedented budget shortfall that will significantly affect public services, a federal administration that seeds chaos and division, mounting infrastructure needs, and a housing crisis that will take intensive cooperation and time to solve.’ Pirtle-Guiney is also offering hope, saying that in addition to these challenges, there are opportunities. Elana Pirtle-Guiney, welcome back.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you and I’m glad you included that second sentence. I was worried you were going to end on the doom and gloom there.

Miller: That would have been an unfair, shortened version of your entire op-ed, I would not do that. I want to start with the budget shortfall though. Some of you did mention there with the caveat that we’re waiting for the mayor’s budget, but because the issue is so big that I imagine it’s overshadowing everything that you and the other 11 members of the council are thinking about right now. Can you just first remind us what the timeline is? What are the next big steps in this process?

Pirtle-Guiney: Absolutely. So the mayor has been working hard on balancing the budget and the first week of May, we will get the mayor’s proposed budget. The mayor’s job in our new form of government is to propose a budget. The council’s job is to ultimately pass a final budget. So once we get the mayor’s budget the first week of May, we will have about three weeks to make any big changes to that that we’d like to see. We then have to get approval from a regional body that looks at local government budgets, and then we’ll have a couple of more weeks to make small changes that we need to after that before passing the budget in June.

Miller: I want to turn to the amount of the general fund shortfall. The existing general fund shortfall, as I understand it, correct me if any of these numbers are wrong, is $65 million.

Pirtle-Guiney: Correct.

Miller: That’s the gap between current service levels and the money you will have coming in. But that’s not the number that Portlanders will have seen in article after article. The headlines talk about $93 million because the mayor wants to put $28 million new dollars towards his plan to end unsheltered homelessness.

Pirtle-Guiney: Correct.

Miller: So what number do you have in your mind right now? It’s a big difference. That’s the $65 million which is the current service level general fund shortfall, or the $93 million which is only $93 million because it includes the mayor’s big new…

Pirtle-Guiney: New program.

Miller: New ask. So in your mind right now, what is the shortfall?

Pirtle-Guiney: The way that I have described this at town halls and forums is that we have a $65 million budget gap and a mayor with a $28 million new program that he would like us to prioritize funding and which I guess doesn’t answer your question. Your question is which is the number.

Miller: Well no, what you just you just described is factual, but I guess what I really want to know… and this is maybe sneaky, not-so-veiled way to ask how you’re thinking about that ask on the mayor’s part. So let me put it this way, do you think that the mayor’s plan is so good that for every new dollar that would go towards it, it makes sense to cut a dollar from existing services?

Pirtle-Guiney: Luckily, the mayor has done a lot of work to try to bring in outside funding to cover at least part of the $28 million that he’s asking for. He has been talking to Metro and the state and neighboring counties to see if he can find dollars that are already set aside for shelter and homeless services so that he’s not coming to council with a $28 million ask.

Miller: This is at a time when the county, for example, is still looking at a gigantic shortfall of their own…

Pirtle-Guiney: Yes.

Miller: …and also, I mean, it does seem a little bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul if you’re talking about taking existing money that’s budgeted for some other aspect of homeless services. So we’re not… even that idea is not creating new pots of money, it’s just moving money around.

Pirtle-Guiney: Let me tell you how I’m looking at our shelter money. How about that?

Miller: Please.

Pirtle-Guiney: What I’ve said to the mayor is that I would like to make sure that we fund existing shelter before we add anything new because we have people who are in shelter, who are working on moving toward being stabilized, moving toward housing, and we should not disrupt that path for them, their ability to get into housing. So from my perspective, first priority when it comes to shelter ‒ which is actually a very small part of our total general fund budget ‒ let’s make sure we can take care of folks who are already in shelter and moving towards stability before we add different. And then if there’s money available to add different, great.

Council will have to weigh shelter programs against a lot of other programs that are in the general fund as we figure out what matters most to Portlanders and what we consider core services. When you have budget cuts this large, you’re not just trimming away the extra. You are laying people off, you are cutting into programs that are really important. You are cutting into things that people love, and we will have to balance the gravity of what we are being asked to cut in other program areas with those asks on shelter services and a lot of folks on council are thinking really hard about what what they care about most for our city and what they think Portlanders need most.

Miller: What have those conversations been like? When you’ve said to the mayor, ‘hey, I actually think we should prioritize existing shelter resources, shelter beds before we think about new ones,’ what response did you get?

Pirtle-Guiney: It is hard for anybody to hear that their program isn’t the number one thing.

Miller: Their program that is what they ran on and seems to be from the outside what they care most about.

Pirtle-Guiney: And I also think he understands that if his goal is to end unsheltered homelessness, you can’t do that by closing shelters that exist. Right? He needs a yes and, and I think where those conversations will get harder is as we weigh shelter against some of those other priorities, which of course is something that we don’t get to do until we get the mayor’s proposed budget which will come out next week, two weeks from now, the first week of May.

Miller: Yeah, is it May 5th? Is that when it’s expected? You took issue with what were called preliminary budget recommendations that the city administrator Michael Jordan put out in February. Why? What were you hoping for and what did you get?

Pirtle-Guiney: The city administrator’s job is to put out the first take at what are some of the cuts that we should be looking at? What are some of the things that bureaus have put forward and said ‘we can make these cuts to get to a balanced budget?’ And I had hoped we would see some of the harder decisions reflected there. We had specifically asked ‒ we being the council ‒ had specifically asked the city administrator if he was up to the task of doing hard things when we interviewed him for this position. It’s one year. He’s here for the next year and then the mayor is planning on moving through a process to find a more permanent city administrator. And he said, ‘yes, absolutely, that’s what you do when you’re here for a short period of time.’ And then we didn’t see those things reflected.

Now, I think some of what he did was really important because it aired issues that allowed Portlanders to respond and tell us what their values are and what they care about. And we’ve heard a lot of that. It gave people the opportunity to talk about park services and our recreational services. Those are all really important things, too.

Miller: When you say the hard decisions, though, do I understand correctly you’re basically saying that you would have appreciated a recommended budget, preliminary one that that said, ‘even though this is painful, we think we should consider this level of cuts for these services and this level of cuts for these services, and that’s how you make up the $65 million or the $93 million?’ That’s what you wanted to see?

Pirtle-Guiney: The city administrator can’t put out a balanced recommendation, but I was hoping that he would get a little bit closer and I was hoping that there would be some more clear direction on how we might close the budget gap. Yes.

Miller: And now is a good time to make this even more complicated because I was talking about the general fund shortfall, but that’s not even the complete whole, as I understand it, that the city is grappling with. There are non-general fund gaps as well: $42 million for transportation, $23 million for parks, an estimated $16 million for permitting and development and more, sewers as well. Without getting into specifics ‒ and you talked a little bit about this in in sort of in broad terms before saying that that we’re talking about actual cuts services that are going to be coming ‒ but can you give us a sense for the scale of service cuts or service reductions that Portlanders right now should be preparing themselves for? Basically, how bad is it going to be?

Pirtle-Guiney: So we have a few different levers. There are cuts, there are a number of fees, especially in the parks system, have been lowered over the past few years that could be increased. On the non-general fund side, a lot of those bureaus are are funded through fees among other resources. So there are levers we can turn down (cuts) and levers we can turn up (funding). And one of the things we haven’t gotten to talk with Portlanders about very much is whether they want us to be focusing solely on the cuts lever, or whether they want us to focus on some of those fees levers as well.

Miller: Like, should it cost $10 to drop in for a swim as opposed to $4 or $5?

Pirtle-Guiney: I certainly hope we’re not talking about $10.

Miller: I mean, okay, but I mean at a certain point if it’s gonna, if it’s if folks couldn’t see you moving your hands if they were on knobs, but I mean if we’re somehow they’re they’re only meaningful increases if they’re going to actually bring in enough revenue to to make the services still viable, right? The $10 was something I made up, but it has to be something if you’re talking about a meaningful increase.

Pirtle-Guiney: I think what Portlanders should expect is a combination of a few different things. We need to look at how we can do things more efficiently. That will not get us anywhere near $65 million in cuts, but it would be irresponsible of us to not have that conversation when we’re looking at cuts this deep. That’s the type of thing I’d hope to see in the city administrator proposal, but that I do expect the mayor to put forward. That gets us part of the way there.

Then we look at what are the things that can wait? What are the things that don’t have a disparate impact, that don’t cost more, that don’t set us back if we wait a year or two. I don’t know yet what those are, but that’s a conversation that we need to be having. That’s a category we need to be looking for. And then we look at what are cuts to services that we rely on today and how do we make those cuts as least bad as possible.

Miller: The mayor obviously made ending unsheltered homelessness the centerpiece of his agenda. As I mentioned, it was the centerpiece of his candidacy and now what he hopes to accomplish now that he’s in office. How much attention do you get the sense that he’s paying to the rest of the city’s services and priorities?

Pirtle-Guiney: I would say more and more, because these things are all interconnected, but there are certainly a lot of things that with 12 counselors we are able to focus on and talk about that move beyond some of the conversations that I think as just one person he’s able to have.

Miller: Since you were all sworn in ‒ I did this math today. I think I was accurate ‒ there have been 598 individual yes votes on the part of the 12 members of the council, and only 10 no votes. And that’s not 10 resolutions voted down. That is 10 individual members of the council voting no on some issue or another since January. So, a huge amount of public agreement in the city council votes, 600 to 10. How do you explain that?

Pirtle-Guiney: City councils do a number of different things. We vote on policy changes. We also vote on moving forward the business of the city a lot. So appointing Portlanders to boards and commissions. The hope is that by the time we get somebody before us, they have been well vetted, they are qualified, they bring a new, unique, important perspective that isn’t part of the board or commission we’re appointing them to. And that’s a moment where everybody can come together and say we all support this person. And we have had a number of things like that brought before council, which has allowed us this opportunity to really come together.

Miller: So, is it also fair to say that one of the reasons for this seemingly gigantic imbalance towards just agreement is that you haven’t been voting on contentious ordinances yet? These are votes on rules or resolutions where there is broad agreement because they’re not super contentious issues?

Pirtle-Guiney: I would say that for every council meeting, there are multiple of those types of things, which is why you see the imbalance. There also have been some very controversial things, some of which have been worked out so that people can get to a yes. We’ve had some amendments brought forward with significant debate where if amendments hadn’t been adopted, we might not have gotten unanimous votes, but amendments got us to unanimous or near unanimous votes. We’re doing a lot of controversial work, too. We’re doing it well and we’re working together.

Miller: How long before you actually start voting on meatier and more divisive ordinances, passing, you know, the equivalent of laws?

Pirtle-Guiney: We had the opportunity for that this past week with the ordinance to ban the use of AI tools that price fix rent. We ended up sending that back to the committee because there are in-the-moment updates happening in other cities that we wanted to get a better understanding of, really understand the legal environment and make sure that we are voting on the strongest policy possible. So, that went back to committee, which of course was a unanimous vote because that allows us to do more work.

Miller: But that would have been the first one, 100 days in. I guess I’m wondering if you see more on the horizon and that Portlanders can expect so policy changes or new ordinance is coming soon.

Pirtle-Guiney: Yes. So the other big policy that we didn’t get to because Wednesday’s meeting ran long would have prioritized specific neighborhoods for sidewalk investments. We have neighborhoods in our city where only 30 or 40% of the streets in those neighborhoods have sidewalks, some even less, and we have a resolution that will be coming forward directing PBOT to prioritize specific neighborhoods for sidewalk investments. That will likely have a lot of debate. My guess is that the end vote won’t be too divisive, but there may be some very divisive amendments in the meantime, and I might be wrong. Counselors may be relatively split on that.

Miller: One of the issues that you still haven’t worked out as a council is how public comment should work, whether it should happen only in smaller committee meetings, only in full council meetings, both, some even more complicated combinations. Why has this been so complicated?

Pirtle-Guiney: In part, I think there’s confusion because we have a new structure. And we probably did not do enough work saying to Portlanders committees are the place where the bulk of the work will be done. So let me say right now to Portlanders, committees are the place where we should be doing the bulk of our work. We have five people. It’s a pretty balanced group in terms of the interests of the council.

Miller: And just to be clear, maybe you should step back and explain what a committee is.

Pirtle-Guiney: Perfect.

Miller: I mean, if you’re telling Portlanders this is where the work is done, what are these bodies?

Pirtle-Guiney: A committee is a subgroup of council. Right now our committees have five people on them. Our rules allow between four and six people on a committee, and committees have representation from three or four districts in trying to balance all of the different things we needed to balance ‒ a few of them only have three districts represented ‒ and a balance of interests on council. And it’s a place where a smaller group of counselors can really become the experts on something. They can do all of the background research, dig in on the details, because there’s not time for all of us to be experts on everything.

And frankly, when you have 12 people debating an issue, that’s a lot of voices in the room. So it allows us to work more effectively and to hear from more Portlanders on really important issues.

That’s where we should be doing the bulk of amending issues. That’s where we should be doing the bulk of our work reaching out to Portlanders and hearing through public testimony what matters to people. By the time something gets to council, my hope personally. is that amendments that are coming are because there were late-breaking concerns raised that we didn’t know about earlier or because there’s an issue that is particular to one neighborhood or one person on council where there was no way for that to have been properly represented in the committee or we heard from constituents about a new piece that wasn’t raised in committee. There will be times when those things happen and we have to amend things on the docket at a full council meeting.

We also allow public testimony on most issues in council for that same reason. Let’s make sure there’s nothing we missed. But council should really be about making sure there’s nothing we missed and getting the buy-in from all 12 of us and having that opportunity to catch things we might have missed. Committee is where we should be digging into the bulk of the work and where I really hope Portlanders can spend a lot of time with our committee chairs helping us work out important issues.

Miller: But if I understood you correctly, it does sound like you’re saying that you see a role for the public testimony, public comment, in both of those venues, but just more of it then in committees?

Pirtle-Guiney: That’s the question we still need to tackle is how do we help to encourage Portlanders to testify in committees?

Miller: And how do you make it so you have an efficient, effective system that actually gets done.

Pirtle-Guiney: So that we’re not duplicating testimony. We don’t want people to feel like they have to testify in both places. That’s not a good use of your time, of Portlanders’ time.

Miller: So what would you vote for? I mean, in terms of the rules for how public comment, public testimony, should work.

Pirtle-Guiney: There are a lot of options here. What I can tell you is that as we have these conversations in the governance committee, which is where we’ll make a lot of these decisions, I will continue thinking about how this helps us to have really important, meaty discussions in committee where we can spend more time and become experts on issues and also allow counsel to be a backstop for any issues that were missed.

Miller: Six of the more progressive counselors have begun meeting as their own caucus to discuss policies and how to be successful in the new form of government. This is completely allowed. How do you think about this new development?

Pirtle-Guiney: I said from the start that if we were going to have caucuses, we should not have any or we should have a lot to make sure that we don’t start to divide in a way that feels more like more traditionally partisan bodies.

Miller: More like the U.S. Congress.

Pirtle-Guiney: There you go, or the state legislature. We are a nonpartisan body. So I want to make sure that we don’t start to feel like we have a divide between two camps. I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for counselors who share a similar goal or a similar value or a similar perspective to get together periodically and talk about how they can represent Portlanders who also share that goal or value or perspective in the work that they’re doing across their committees on council.

Miller: My understanding is that you’re not among that six.

Pirtle-Guiney: I’m not.

Miller: Is there, is there some other group of six that has come together?

Pirtle-Guiney: There is not.

Miller: Why not? And I mean, let me ask you in a blunt way. Is it because the other six of you don’t want to be seen as the “conservative” caucus?

Pirtle-Guiney: I don’t think there’s anybody who would describe themselves as conservative on council. I think we have some folks who might describe themselves as more moderate, some folks who might describe themselves as more traditional progressives, some folks who might describe themselves as leftist.

Miller: Where are you in this?

Pirtle-Guiney: I would call myself a more traditional progressive.

Miller: Okay. But I guess I’m wondering why are you not a member of a caucus? Why hasn’t another one come up to say, ‘all right, well, these other six, we respect them, they’re our colleagues, they’ve banded together, they agree on this set of things.’ But there are others of you who have not banded together. I’m just curious why.

Pirtle-Guiney: Well, I wouldn’t encourage that because again, I don’t want there to start to feel like we have this divide. I don’t think that’s healthy at the city level. We need to be in a place where we can actually come together, and as we find things that we share common goals on, work with any of our colleagues. And I think you’ve seen that happening. If you watched last Wednesday’s meeting, there were some interesting patterns in who were voting together that shifted across different issues that were before council, and that to somebody who was looking at just that group of six and who else is on council might have seemed unexpected.

Miller: But to go back to what you’re saying when this started, when caucuses became a possibility, your hope was that if there were going to be some, that there’d be a lot. Is it fair to say that that hasn’t happened yet?

Pirtle-Guiney: Not in a formal way. The counselors in my district, District 2, meet periodically together. You might call that a district caucus. I know some of the other districts do as well. I think there are folks who meet regularly about issues that they care about. We’re not calling those caucuses, but there are groups that meet again, small groups so that we don’t have a quorum, to discuss issues that they jointly care about

Miller: Elana Pirtle-Guiney, thanks very much.

Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Elana Pirtle-Guiney is the president of the Portland City Council.

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