As Portland city councilors navigate their new roles in a revamped city government, they’re feeling shorthanded. On Wednesday, councilors will decide whether to expand their current budgets, which designates just one staffer each, to better meet their needs.
The proposal, submitted by Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney, challenges the funding plan set in place by the previous city council and tests the new council’s burgeoning relationship with the city’s administrative branch.
Portland's new 12-person city council meets for the first time on Jan. 2, 2025.
Alex Zielinski / OPB
The plan would use $4.6 million to cover an additional staff position in each council office and three additional staffers in the mayor’s office. Currently, the mayor is budgeted to have five staff members. It would also give each councilor $261,000 to spend on other office expenses that don’t include staff salaries. The spending package only covers costs for the rest of the current fiscal year, which ends in June.
Councilors’ staff budgets have been a point of contention long before they entered office. Last year, city staff tasked with overseeing the government transition advised the city council to pass a budget that allowed for at least two employees per councilor on the expanded 12-person council. That previous council was made up of four commissioners who had around seven staff apiece and a mayor with 17 employees. They ultimately voted to adopt a budget with funds to cover just one staff position for each councilor.
“We can’t do the work that Portlanders rightfully would like to see us do with only one staff person,” Pirtle-Guiney said in a Tuesday interview on OPB’s Think Out Loud. Pirtle-Guiney represents District 2 on city council, which includes most Northeast Portland neighborhoods west of Interstate 205.
“If we don’t do that [work] well, I don’t know that Portlanders will continue to have faith in our city to operate effectively,” she said.
In the midst of a tight financial year – and with anticipated budget cuts on the horizon – it’s not immediately clear where the money will come from. The draft proposal suggests tapping into the City Administrator’s Office, which manages neighborhood programs, the city’s equity office, trash removal and homeless shelter operations. That office has an annual budget of $127 million, while the city council has around $4 million to spend yearly.
In a memo to city council, the city’s Chief Financial Officer Jonas Biery advised cutting one-time funds in the City Administrator’s Office currently set aside to manage shelters, trash clean-up and homeless camp removals to fund the council staff request. Biery also noted it would cost nearly $12 million annually to make these staff increases permanent beyond June.
The city budget office currently estimates a $27 million budget gap in the fiscal year beginning July 1, due to declining property taxes, inflation and other revenue shortfalls. That gap could widen as a result of pending labor agreements with city unions, which call for wage increases. The draft ordinance directs councilors to find ways to make this expanded council office budgets permanent in the next budget cycle.
Councilor Mitch Green said he’s frustrated with Biery’s suggestion to put homeless and trash removal programs on the chopping block to offset staffing costs.
“We’re being offered a narrow set of choices without seeing the whole picture,” said Green, who represents Portland’s westside and some southeast neighborhoods in District 4. “It’s important for the council to develop its own independent cost benefit framework to measure the trade-offs on our own.”
Councilor Sameer Kanal agrees. In an email to OPB, he noted that the city could consider cuts to “contracting, redundancies, and contingency funds” before cutting “urgent houseless-related programs.”
Kanal and Green tentatively support Pirtle-Guiney’s draft proposal. Green said he believes the single-staffer model weakens council’s ability to craft smart legislation and analyze policy.
City Councilor Steve Novick isn’t convinced. Novick, who was used to a larger staff when he sat on Portland City Council a decade ago, said he’d rather wait a few months to decide whether to spend the city’s scant budget dollars on councilor staff.
“I think that we’d be better off waiting until we’re sort of deeper into the annual budget process and more aware of how bad the cuts are going to be,” Novick said. “I want to give it some time and see if, in fact, we are all drowning and we just can’t do our jobs.”
Councilor Candace Avalos agrees with Novick, but she spent the past week working on an alternative budget package to strike a compromise. Avalos has suggested a $1.5 million budget package that only covers the cost of additional staff for councilors and the mayor, but not money for extra office expenses.
“I want us to be measured in what we’re asking for as we’re staring down a big budget hole,” said Avalos. “It’s important to communicate to the public how I think we should prioritize money.”
Avalos pointed to the fact that contract negotiations with two city labor unions have broken down over wages.
“It’s hard to ask for more employees when current city employees are struggling,” she said.
It’s not clear which exact alternative proposals – or how many – councilors will be asked to consider. Other councilors are still ironing out the details of other alternative funding proposals, less than 24 hours before the Wednesday evening council meeting.