Some Portlanders will be seeing a single issue on their ballot, a 75% increase in the current levy that funds parks.
Under this new increase, the average homeowner would pay an extra $133 a year in taxes. The levy would help fund swim lessons, summer camps, sports programs and allows the Parks Bureau to provide free or reduced cost programs to low-income residents. However, the levy would not be used for much needed maintenance and the city still lacks a stable funding plan for parks, which a recent city audit found.
Jason Williams is the executive director and founder of the Taxpayers Association of Oregon and opposes the levy. Portland City Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney supports the increase. We’ll hear from both sides as they make their case on how Portlanders should vote.
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 OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Most Portlanders have just one issue on their ballots, which have to be turned in or mailed one week from today. It’s a tax measure that would increase the current Parks & Recreation Levy by 75%. If it passes, the median homeowner would pay an extra $133 a year in taxes. That money would help fund swim lessons, summer camps and sports programs, along with daily upkeep. It would not go towards the at least half a billion dollar capital maintenance backlog that the bureau has identified.
We’re going to hear two perspectives on this measure right now. Elana Pirtle-Guiney supports it. She is a Portland City Council president. Jason Williams opposes it. He is the executive director and founder of the Taxpayers Association of Oregon. Good to have both of you on the show.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thanks for having us.
Jason Williams: Good to be here.
Miller: Elana Pirtle-Guiney, as always with these conversations, we like to start, when we’re talking about ballot measures, with just an explanation of what the measure would actually do. So what is Measure 26-260?
Pirtle-Guiney: Portlanders love their parks. It’s where we meet friends for a walk, where our kids learn to swim, where seniors stay active, where our families gather on sunny days or sometimes even rainy days like today. But right now the parks we love are at risk. Without the Portland Parks Levy, Portland Parks & Recreation will lose almost half of its budget, which would inevitably force closures or cause us to have to eliminate programs for those who need them most.
What Measure 26-260 provides is essential funding that keeps playgrounds safe, pools open, bathrooms clean and trails clear. It allows us to continue our fire prevention programs, our habitat restoration programs and the programs that ensure that park programming is affordable and accessible to all Portlanders. Right now, we have a levy that pays for our park system. It funds almost half of our park system. That levy is set to expire next year. This is a new levy which would replace the current levy and ensure that we can continue funding these critical programs.
Miller: To be clear, as I mentioned, it would replace it but with a 75% increase from the current rate.
Pirtle-Guiney: I’m sure we’ll talk about this more later, but because of some increasing costs, we have had to ask voters to increase the rate of that levy a little bit, yes.
Miller: Jason Williams, do you disagree with anything about the way Elana Pirtle-Guiney has, so far, explained the measure? Obviously, you’re here because you don’t want voters to pass it. But in terms of her description of what it would actually do, are there disagreements?
Williams: Well, it does it at a huge cost, so that’s our big thing. We all want good parks. We want to see them be the best that we can do. And here at the Taxpayers Association, I want to let people know, we’re not anti-tax, we’re low tax. There’s 23 local tax measures on the ballots all over Oregon. We’ve singled out six that we don’t like. And by the way, there were nearly 50 local tax measures in May. So [there are] a lot of these tax measures.
But when we look at this tax measure, we notice [that] our parks have become too expensive. When I look at how much it costs to run a park, the average city spends about $100 per person that they serve. But in Portland, it’s over $200, nearing $300. So we are double and nearly triple what it costs to run a park. And that’s where we come in and say, “hey, can we just slow down, just cut some costs and cut some things out?” That’s where our perspective is.
Miller: Elana Pirtle-Guiney, let’s go back to the increase itself, the 75% increase from the current levy that’s going to expire. What specifically is driving that cost increase?
Pirtle-Guiney: I want to be clear about that. It’s about $11 a month for the average home in Portland. So when you talk about the increase, we’re talking about $11 a month. And while the increase in the Parks levy is larger, we’ve had some confusion because people think that their property taxes are going up by that much. That’s not the case. This will lead to an average increase on a ratepayer’s property taxes in Portland of 2.2%. So I just want to make sure we have those facts clear.
Miller: So what you’re saying is that you don’t want people to think that their property taxes are going up 75%?
Pirtle-Guiney: Correct.
Miller: That $133, or $11 a month, that’s based on the median assessed valuation of a home in Portland?
Pirtle-Guiney: Exactly. So some people will pay a little more than that. Some people will pay much less than that.
Miller: But as for the reason behind this – obviously, we’ve been hearing for years about inflation. Is that all we’re talking about or are there other reasons for this sizable increase in this specific levy?
Pirtle-Guiney: That is a big chunk of it. A big chunk of it is inflation. And if you think about how costs have gone up over the last few years, the cost of everything from the people who do the work in our parks, to the toilet paper that is in the park bathrooms, to the electricity and gas that we need to use to run the trucks that bring equipment to our parks for our maintenance crews, all of those costs have gone up. And unfortunately that means that our dollar stretches a little bit less far.
Portlanders have been very clear that they rely on our park system in a number of ways and that they value our park system. So when faced, during the last budget cycle, with the option of cutting parks or trying to find ways to continue to fund our current parks programming, Portlanders said very clearly, to my colleagues and I, that they wanted us to try to find ways to continue funding our current parks programming. Unfortunately, that means that as we ask Portlanders to replace the current levy, we needed to increase the cost a little bit.
Miller: Jason Williams, inflation is real. I don’t think it’s gone up 75% in the last five years, but it is real. But what is your overall plan for how government services can keep up with rising costs without increasing taxes?
Williams: An audit of the Parks Department showed that they have been taking on too many projects that they cannot afford. So in that regard, when you do that, no amount of money can fix the problem. And I want to remind people that look, as I said, we’re already spending nearly twice to triple the amount of money it takes to run a park.
And the people who are paying that inflation are also seniors on a limited income. They’re being told they gotta pay this new gas tax that’s coming through the legislature. They got to pay for all the property tax increases that happened on the May ballot. They have to pay this, but they can’t. And as a result, because we’ve reached that peak taxation – Portland is one of the most highest taxed places in all of North America – families with kids are leaving. We’re seeing the first population declines in 40 years. They can’t afford it. So, all we’re asking is that we just have our parks act like most of the other [places] that have beautiful parks in the country, under the same budget.
The audit also said that most of the parks, I think it was 80%, are poor quality. So it’s like if we are giving you double the amount of money it takes to run a park and 80% of your parks are below quality. It’s a spending problem.
Miller: So Elana Pirtle-Guiney, let me give you a chance to respond to this. And there’s two big points there that the audit mentioned. I think it makes sense to take them one by one. We can get back to the big capital deferred maintenance in a second.
But the other point that he brought up … this is the way the auditors described this. They said, “Parks committed to funding the construction of new assets without identifying a funding source for ongoing maintenance. As a result, the city added assets it cannot afford.” To put it even more bluntly, even in its endorsement, Willamette Week, largely based on that audit, said, “The unvarnished truth is that Portland parks have been governed with a toxic blend of good intentions and budgetary recklessness.”
Given this previous behavior, why give this bureau more money?
Pirtle-Guiney: I want to pull from the Willamette Week endorsement since you pulled from that as well.
Miller: OK. Competing sentences from the same writers there.
Pirtle-Guiney: They also said, “City officials saw, correctly, that neighborhoods east of 82nd Avenue lacked the civic treasures we described and delivered long-overdue amenities.” So you’re right. The audit is right. The Parks Bureau did invest in new infrastructure and they didn’t have a good way to pay for that new infrastructure. But they knew that parts of our city did not have the parks, the community centers, the space for recreation and the natural areas that the rest of our city enjoyed. And that was not OK with the leaders of our Parks Bureau.
Now, what we’ve done differently this time is we have actually built into the cost of the current levy, funding for the two big projects that we know will be coming online in the next five years. There’s a North Portland Aquatic Center and a Skate Park downtown. Money has already been set aside to construct those. But we wanted to make sure that we didn’t have a big gap at the end of this levy. So we built into the cost of this levy, the cost of maintaining those assets as well, to ensure that we were making responsible decisions.
And I want to remind your listeners that the time that the audit points to was under the old form of government, which ran bureaus differently and had a lot of different incentives. One of the things that we have tried to do on this new city council is make sure that we are looking at past budget practices and thinking long term about responsible budgeting, as we move forward.
That small piece, can we actually afford the two big, new things we know will be coming online while this levy is active … is one of those steps, one of actually many steps we took in this levy, to ensure that we’re being as responsible as Portlanders deserve and ought to hold us to, with these levy dollars.
Miller: Jason, let me go back to you because you brought up the estimate. I’ve seen it’s between $550 million and $800 million to get those playgrounds, restrooms and paths that the Bureau has identified as being either in poor or very bad condition, back into reasonable condition. And it’s worth saying here that, as you and others who are against this levy have pointed out, the vast majority of this money, it’s not going to go towards that kind of capital maintenance. It’ll go towards things like day to day operations. But there is a connection between the two of them.
Are you at all worried that by not funding this levy and not having as many toilets being cleaned, trash cans being cleaned or daily maintenance happening, that you could actually lead to an increase in overall future capital expenditures? I mean, the short version of that is penny-wise, pound foolish?
Williams: Well, if this thing passes and we’re going to spend triple the amount it costs to run a park, by comparison, and we can’t keep our restrooms clean, that’s really bad. But I’ve come with some solutions. I’ve come with some solutions so that we can get some more money.
First of all, one of the things that’s driving the Park’s budget is we got graffiti and vandalism. When we arrest people in Portland for graffiti, they’re often given a hand slap and they’re back on the street tagging another 1,000 places. So [one solution is] if we can help reduce the cost of the damage.
The same thing with the homeless problem – they have obviously overwhelmed our parks. It’s sad because homelessness during COVID was declining across the country, but it was growing in Oregon [by] 20%. So we’ve been attracting all of the homeless to our park. And of course, because they know we’ve given out 25,000 free tents, we’ll give a person a free tent, then we’ll clear the place and then we offer them a new free tent when they come back.
And the last thing is – and here’s a big pot of money that we could tap into – Portland and the area politicians have been giving a lot of money for special projects. Taxpayer subsidies went to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, one of the most expensive hotels in all of Oregon. Not only that, but the food cart right next to it, they got taxpayer subsidies. And I don’t think government subsidized tacos are what our founders imagined. Across the street, you have family owned restaurants that didn’t get tax subsidies.
So these are problems and this may sound unusual, but this is not the first time we have done this. The hotel at the Portland Convention Center was given $70 million in various tax benefits that people agreed to … There were people who wanted to build it for free.
Miller: I want to give a chance to Elana Pirtle-Guiney to respond to this. But focusing it back on the parks … and Jason, one of the points that you’ve made a couple times now is comparing the per capita or per acre expenditure on parks in Portland to other areas. That’s a point you’ve brought up three times now. Council President Pirtle-Guiney, what’s your response to that? Why should Portland spend so much more per square inch in its parks than similar cities?
Pirtle-Guiney: I’d like to see those numbers. I haven’t seen that data point before. I think it’s hard to compare a park system in Portland, where we have Mount Tabor, Forest Park and the Children’s Arboretum in my district, in North and Northeast Portland, and some really large, beautiful public areas, open areas, to a park system that focuses, say, just on your one-square-block parks with a playground on them. Both are really important, but unless we’re comparing like park systems, I’m struggling with these numbers.
I do think, though, that you raised a really important point about maintenance, which was also in the audit. And I’ll point out that there are three types of maintenance in our park system. There’s the
daily, are you cleaning the bathrooms? Are you mowing the ball fields? Are you keeping the natural areas healthy? And that is part of what is covered in this Park’s Levy.
That is also part of what ensures we don’t have degradation in our park system, which is the point that you were asking about: Does this prevent us from having a bigger backlog? Then there’s small maintenance projects like changing out a light bulb, fixing a broken door handle, things like that. Again, taking care of those things in the moment prevents backlogs later. That’s also captured in this levy.
The third piece of maintenance is the major maintenance projects, and that’s where Parks, as well as a number of bureaus across the city, have a big backlog. The city of Portland has not been good at maintaining our assets and the same month that the City Council referred this measure to the voters, we also directed the city administration, our bureaus, to bring us a plan by next summer on how we can address our asset management issues, our maintenance backlog across bureaus, including Parks.
So there’s a small amount of money in this levy to ensure that we don’t have more failures in the meantime. And there’s already work in progress, separately that the City Council is undertaking, to address that large backlog. The previous Parks Levy and this current Parks Levy were designed to address those first two pieces of maintenance. They were never designed to take care of that entire backlog.
Miller: Jason Williams, let me give you the last word?
Williams: Yes, Portland is building a $15 million skateboard park. Think about that $15 million. That’s how much they defunded police in that year one. So it’s like, of course, once we defunded the police, crime just went rampant. It affected our parks. So if the City Council can better balance the budget, not only Parks, but all of the bureaus, the idea that we took $15 million out of the police and gave it … well, then $15 million went to go to build a skateboard park, and people said we’ll build a skateboard park, we’ll reduce crime. It’s like there’s a certain insanity kind of going on in Portland. And I think if we say “no,” we’ll be able to refocus Parks and maybe the city on some better decisions.
Miller: Jason Williams and Elana Pirtle-Guiney, thanks very much.
Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you.
Williams: Thank you.
Miller: Jason Williams is the executive director and founder of the Taxpayers Association of Oregon. Elana Pirtle-Guiney is the Portland City Council president.
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