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It’s become increasingly clear over the past month that Portland Parks & Recreation may take the brunt of substantial budget cuts as the city stares down a $93 million general fund shortfall.
Last month, City Councilor Steve Novick, who co-chairs the council’s Climate, Resilience and Land Use Committee, asked the parks bureau to create a presentation to illustrate what up to $58 million in cuts would look like for the bureau. “We need to consider that every dollar will come from parks,” Novick said as he introduced the results last week, “so I’ve asked them what that would look like.”
What it would look like, the March 13 presentation made clear, is a severely diminished bureau with far less access to greenspaces across the city.
City councilors, having moved on from the denial stage of grief, are now bargaining. Here’s what’s been happening behind the scenes.
WHY THE PARKS BUREAU IS IN TROUBLE: The vast majority of the city’s general fund goes to just four bureaus or functions: police, fire, homeless services and parks. Public sentiment in recent years has shifted in favor of police; polling shows Portlanders want faster 911 response and safer neighborhoods above all else.
The city, as of last month, faces a $93 million general fund budget shortfall this coming fiscal year. (That budget gap includes the $28 million Mayor Keith Wilson wants for his shelter expansion, creating a deficit that some critics call artificially high.) If the City Council opts not to cut public safety spending, that leaves primarily Portland Parks & Recreation.
While city administrator Michael Jordan described in a memo earlier this month a scenario in which the parks bureau cut $23 million, that represents only a portion of the potential cuts.
Novick asked for a dramatic presentation of the worst-case scenario for parks if the City Council opts to make steep cuts to the parks bureau, totaling $58 million.
“We have a lot of people saying, don’t cut public safety and don’t raise taxes. And [Mayor Keith Wilson] wants to increase spending on homeless services. If we accept that as conventional wisdom, what does that leave to cut?” Novick asked during a meeting of the climate committee last week. “Largely, it leaves parks.”
And that’s not all. To the disbelief and incredulity of councilors, the parks bureau told them earlier this year that voters would have to double the Parks Levy from its current rate of 80 cents per $1,000 assessed value to $1.60 or the bureau would have to cut its services by 25%. And doubling the levy would only maintain the bureau’s current service levels, parks officials told councilors. In other words, the current level of funding wouldn’t avert cuts—and the city can’t afford even the current level.
Deputy city administrator Sonia Schmanski, who oversees the parks bureau, told the council committee last week that the bureau had increasingly relied in recent years on dollars not from the general fund—a tenuous model.
“I told some of our partners last week, we are starting to feel recklessly leveraged on partnerships and one-time funds and levy funds,” she said. “It’s so understandable that we use all the revenues we have year to year to the margins to do as much as possible, but then we get to moments like this where the check comes due.”
WHAT’S ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK: On March 13, Novick got the presentation he asked for.
The list of cuts from the parks bureau was substantial: Closing a community center. Eliminating nearly all of the bureau’s after-school and summer programs. Reducing daily maintenance of parks across the city.
Naturally, neighborhood outcry was swift and loud. Residents of the Montavilla, St. Johns and Peninsula neighborhoods emerged to protest that their community centers were potentially on the chopping block.
It was reminiscent of 2019, when the parks bureau, facing a much more modest budget shortfall of $6 million, scaled back community centers.
One chart in particular alarmed Councilor Sameer Kanal. It illustrated that if the Parks Levy isn’t renewed at all, and all of the threatened general fund and non-general fund cuts are made, the bureau would dwindle to a $60 million annual budget in just two years, down from its current $190 million.
“To have $60 million within two years of having a budget of $190 million,” Kanal said, “that’s not a functional parks bureau.”
WHAT COULD SOFTEN THE BLOW: One idea, of course, is to take dollars from the Portland Clean Energy Fund, the 2018 climate tax that’s brought in hundreds of millions dollars more than expected. The former City Council used money from that tax to plug holes in the budget last year, and the current City Council is now debating whether to mine the fund again.
That debate was briefly alluded to during the March 13 meeting of Novick’s committee. He said near the end of the meeting: “Councilor [Dan] Ryan and I will have a robust discussion about PCEF funds because I think PCEF is supposed to be about climate change, and maintaining parks and community centers has a rather tenuous connection to PCEF.” To that, Ryan replied to Novick—with his mic turned off, so it’s not clear what he said.
Another idea multiple councilors are pressing is whether the parks bureau could use one-time fees on new developments, called system development charges, to bring some parks assets back online.
Allowable uses of SDCs are laid out in state law. Currently, the parks bureau uses them only to build new parks and facilities, but Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney thinks that’s an unnecessarily stringent interpretation. She wants the parks bureau to explore what other uses might look like.
“Parks has historically had what I would suggest is a narrower interpretation,” Pirtle-Guiney says. “If we are upgrading an asset, if we are bringing back online a park asset, that is expanding capacity just like building new does.”
The parks bureau doesn’t agree it interprets state law too narrowly. Spokesman Mark Ross says the bureau “does not have a different interpretation from other bureaus about allowable uses” and adheres “to the framework provided by state legislation.”
Even so, Ryan said at the March 13 meeting it was “silly” that the city hadn’t prioritized lobbying for a change in state law to broaden how it may spend SDCs. “I cannot understand why you can’t use SDC funds for deferred maintenance,” he said.
Pirtle-Guiney says she’s talking to parks leaders, including deputy city administrator Schmanski, about expanding the bureau’s definition of allowable uses of SDCs.