Setting the Record Straight

Correct — it cuts services instead. The money comes from the fund that pays for firefighters, 911, police, parks, and shelters, and the measure says Council can pull from "the entire City budget" to cover it (despite legal requirements on restricted funds, which make up the majority of the City budget, that specify what those resources can pay for).

Everything in Measure 26-267 hangs on one phrase: "General Fund discretionary ongoing expenses." Every dollar it moves is 2% of whatever that number turns out to be. So it's worth asking where to find that number.

The city doesn't publish it. Portland's budget publishes General Fund discretionary resources — what comes in. The measure keys off expenses — what goes out. Those aren't the same number in any given year, and no one has said which the 2% is calculated against.

The measure’s proponents forecast $16.4 million for the first year of the program. They may have based their math on the City of Portland’s December 2024 general fund forecast, which projected $819.7 million in “Total Expenses with Adds and One Time Spending” for FY 2027-28; 2% of that figure is $16.4 million.

Even the City Attorney’s office struggled to identify the right base figure. In October 2022, when the Charter Commission was weighing this same set-aside, the City Attorney's office told commissioners that 0.5% came to about $4.5 million — computed against the full $927 million General Fund account. The Budget Director corrected the record: the right base was $625.3 million, and 0.5% was about $3.1 million. She had to write a memo explaining that "when someone uses the term General Fund, they could be talking about both discretionary and non-discretionary resources."

And the sponsors' own numbers moved. Their proposed ballot title put the cost at roughly $16,434,000 in FY2028-29. The certified ballot title puts that same year at $17.0 million. Same measure, same term, months apart, and the figure moved by more than half a million dollars.

If the City Attorney needed a correction, the Budget Director needed a memo, and the sponsors' own estimates moved — voters are being asked to write a permanent obligation into the charter against a term that has never once produced a stable, published number.

That's in the measure, and it's what the ballot title tells voters. It invites you to picture a painless source somewhere in an $8.5 billion budget to divert to Participatory Budgeting. It isn't there.

Portland's City Budget Director explained why in a 2022 memo to the Charter Commission, analyzing this same set-aside. General Fund discretionary resources are about 10% of the city's total budget. The other 90% is spoken for: water and sewer ratepayer funds, bond proceeds, federal and state grants, voter-approved levies, dedicated fees. Council can't redirect that money to a new program no matter what the charter says — those restrictions come from state law, bond covenants, and the charter's own utility provisions.

Even inside the General Fund account, some of the money is restricted. The Budget Director's example: “Parks receives fees for recreational services (that can only be used on those recreational services) and expends $40M+ of Parks Operating Levy resources (which are restricted to eligible uses) in the General Fund account.”

So the real pool is the discretionary General Fund. And most of that is already committed:

• Over 10% goes to debt service, required reserves, cost-of-living obligations, legally mandated allocations, and the Council and Auditor's offices — costs the Budget Director wrote "cannot (or likely would not) be cut."

• Over 70% goes to four things: Police, Fire, Parks, and homeless services.

Which leaves a sliver. The Budget Director's conclusion was direct: it is "reasonable to assume that these resources would come from reductions to bureaus." And if Council protects the big four, the cuts land on what's left — 911 dispatch, emergency management, permitting, civic life, the offices that keep the city running.

In reality, "the entire City budget" means one thing: the fund that pays for police, fire, 911, parks, and shelters.

That restriction appears in their FAQ, not the measure. There is no such limit in the charter text — and their own FAQ cites a Seattle PB project that became, in their words, "an ongoing General Fund expense."

Portlanders have a voice, and it should be stronger — through the budget process the city already runs, through their elected-by-district City Councilors, and through a pilot like the one City Club recommended.

In Seattle, about 4,000 people out of 780,000 decided how to spend $27 million in their most recent attempt at Participatory Budgeting. That's not a bigger voice; it's a very small electorate spending a very large check.

It wasn't ignored — it was considered and analyzed by Portland's Charter Commission — citizen volunteers — who requested a City Budget Office fiscal analysis in 2022, then voted 14–2, one short of the 15 needed to send it to the ballot. City Council declined to overturn that decision.

The same commissioners referred seven other charter amendments straight to voters that winter. This measure is effectively that proposal, back at double the percentage.

No American city has locked a percentage of its general fund into its charter for PB.

• NYC's charter mandates a program with no specified dollar figure.

• Boston's charter amendment created an office of participatory budgeting — advocates wanted $40M and got $2M.

• Cleveland voters rejected the percentage-in-the-charter model in 2023.

• Seattle and Greensboro both pulled back their programs when budgets tightened and other funding needs took priority. Unlike Portland under this measure, they could make those adjustments when necessary, because they weren’t bound by a charter-mandated set-aside.

First off, yes — that’s a typo in the language the measure would add to the Charter (Participating, not Participatory).

The audit provision assigns work to someone who doesn't answer to the Council, Mayor, or City Administrator.

Measure 26-267 promises accountability in a single sentence: the City Auditor "shall periodically conduct an independent performance audit."

Portland's Auditor is elected by the people of Portland, independently of the Mayor and Council. That independence is the point — it's why the office can audit bureaus without permission. It also means the Auditor sets her own audit plan and decides what her office examines and when. A charter provision directing her to audit a particular program is unprecedented.

This isn't how Portland normally does it. When voters approve a dedicated funding stream, like the Parks Levy, the standard practice is that the bureau overseeing the program pays for an independent performance audit — the money comes out of the program, and an independent outside auditor is engaged to a defined scope on a defined schedule.

Measure 26-267 carves out at least $16 million a year and assigns the oversight to someone else's budget, with no deadline.