Last year, as the city faced a budget deficit, Portland Street Response was fighting for its existence.

The city’s alternative response program, which sends unarmed social workers, EMTs, and community health workers to aid people experiencing behavioral health crises, was in danger of losing a substantial chunk of its budget under the city commissioner in charge of the program at the time. 

A year later, the city faces a much bigger budget gap, yet no one is calling for funding cuts to the program. In fact, Portland Street Response (PSR) could finally be on a path to serve more people in need.

Earlier this month, Mayor Keith Wilson’s office called the program “a success story” while announcing changes to the mobile crisis response program that will allow PSR to transport people to shelters, food pantries, detox centers, and other service-oriented locations if requested by the client. It’s a major shift. Up until now, PSR workers could arrange transport for someone in need, but couldn’t directly shuttle them anywhere.

PSR responders will also be allowed to serve people beyond the streets, by entering private businesses and lobbies of government buildings to reach people in need.

“Once these changes have been fully implemented, PSR personnel will be able to respond to more call types, connect more individuals to the help they need most, and create better outcomes for those they serve,” Wilson said in an email announcement. The mayor’s office did not respond to questions from the Mercury about the forthcoming changes. 

The changes won’t take effect immediately. PSR workers say it will take a few months for them to make adjustments needed for transport, like retrofitting  vans they currently use to accommodate passengers and their pets. The changes also need to be approved by the labor union representing PSR staff.

Another detail that will take some fleshing out: what a co-response with law enforcement will look like.

Wilson said PSR will be treated more like other first responder agencies in the city, including Portland’s fire and police bureaus. That means the alternative response team could find itself on calls alongside firefighters and police more often. 

“In other words, PSR will be able to respond to more call types and provide services to people in crisis,” as Wilson put it in his March 7 announcement. He said first responders will be able to turn a call over to PSR more often now, even when the initial call “doesn’t meet PSR criteria.”

In many instances, the agency is already doing that.

Since its launch, PSR has been called to assist other emergency response agencies just over 800 times. The bulk of those requests for assistance come from police, according to city data.

Caroline Pope is a community engagement and outreach coordinator with PSR. She says sometimes, a call can be handed off to PSR by police.

“Police realize that we are a better fit in a lot of situations than they are,” Pope says. 

The alternative response program was developed as a police alternative–a dynamic that its supporters, and much of the public, say is an important distinction.

“We are concerned about PSR’s potential increased proximity to law enforcement activities, which could undermine PSR’s original mission as an unarmed, independent 911 response that provides an effective alternative to police for people in crisis,” a statement from Friends of PSR, a volunteer group that advocates for the city program, said in response to the mayor’s announcement. “It is also something explicitly warned against by the last independent program evaluation.”

Stephanie Howard, the city’s Community Safety Division director, said the co-response with other agencies is intended “to provide faster response times” and expand PSR’s ability to respond to more types of calls, including ones that might not initially be assigned to PSR by emergency dispatchers.

So far, PSR has embraced its expanded capabilities. Program leaders say the changes will “improve the program as a whole” by allowing its first responders to access more people in need, but the mayor’s announcement caught the city’s elected officials off guard. 

The Oregonian reported the mayor didn’t consult city councilors before expanding the program’s scope. It’s the latest instance of Portland’s legislative branch feeling side-stepped by its administrative branch.

The communication breakdown extends beyond city hall.

Since 2023, Friends of PSR has pushed for meetings with city officials, and better communication about the program. 

“We have found it pretty hard for City leaders to get back to us or anyone asking questions about Portland Street Response over the last couple of years,” Friends of PSR told the Mercury via email. “We hope they will also provide a response to the questions and concerns raised in our recent statement, which are consistent with the ask of the 12,000 Portlanders and hundreds of local leaders that signed our original petition to restore and grow Portland Street Response.”

Friends of PSR volunteer Jackie Yerby says she still sees room for an improved working relationship between the group and the city’s administrative leaders, but the program is on far better footing now than it was last year. 

“It just feels like the role of PSR is understood differently, and not just secondary to [police or fire], so that feels really good,” Yerby told the Mercury. 

Program struggled shortly after launch

PSR was launched in 2021 by former Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty’s office, in consultation with Street Roots. It was modeled after a program in Eugene, which sends mental health professionals to non-emergency calls involving mental and behavioral health issues where no crime has occurred. Just over a year later, it found itself floundering. Within weeks of taking office, Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, who unseated Hardesty in the 2022 election, ordered PSR workers to stop handing out life-saving supplies to unhoused clients. 

Soon after, the program was cut off from purchases and a hiring freeze was implemented. Staffers were dismayed by the abrupt changes. Many of them quit.

A city audit of PSR found the program was misaligned with the fire bureau, which housed the program at the time. The audit–echoing many of the same takeaways identified by periodic evaluations done by Portland State University–concluded PSR lacked the direction, programmatic support, and the leadership needed for it to thrive.

Gonzalez, the former commissioner who was tasked with overseeing the program as part of his bureau portfolio, seemed to view PSR as the passion project of his predecessor, and more broadly, a drain on the resources of the Fire Bureau.

With faltering support for the program within City Hall, Friends of Portland Street Response was formed. The group served as a mechanism to convey public support for PSR and demand accountability from city leaders in regard to the program.

In 2023, the all-volunteer group delivered a petition to Portland City Hall with roughly 12,000 signatures, seeking clarity about PSR’s future and urging better financial and programmatic support for the fledgling program.

PSR’s budget went from $8.5 million in 2023-24 to $7.4 million in 2024-25. Its staffing has decreased each year since 2022, despite an increase in dispatch requests. Currently, the program has 37 full-time staffers and another 15 short-term workers. Its current budget request for the next year is $8.1 million.

A rebuilding year

Despite the program’s previous challenges within the political climate at City Hall, PSR’s workload has gotten bigger.

Data shows call volume reached its highest point in 2023. It dipped in 2024 due to cutbacks that limited the program’s capacity. Dispatch requests for 2025 are on track to surpass last year’s call volume by about 13 percent.

While facing increased demand and fewer resources, the program also underwent major changes last year, transitioning out of the Fire Bureau. The program is now housed within the Public Safety service area and is overseen by the service area’s deputy city administrator rather than the fire chief. 

For the first time since its inception, PSR is positioned for success. 

“Fiscal year 2025 has been a rebuilding year,” Howard told city councilors during a Community and Public Safety Committee meeting last week. She said PSR just hired 12 new staffers, allowing the team to replace some of the positions lost since 2023.

Howard says the city is also exploring the possibility of expanding PSR to meet the guidelines needed for Medicaid reimbursement, but cautions about the “challenges” of meeting eligibility requirements and establishing the necessary administrative infrastructure.

Like Howard, April Roa, interim program manager at PSR, is looking to the future, rather than just trying to keep the program afloat.

“PSR spent the last three years learning and working to improve skills, training procedures, and collaboration,” Roa told the Public Safety Committee. “The lessons we've learned influence all of our future plans.”

Roa says she’d like to see PSR get to a point where its vehicles can be stationed throughout the city, cutting down on response times and functioning more like a traditional first response system. She laid out a two-phase roadmap for ramping up the crisis response service to operate 24 hours a day, as originally intended. To do that, the program would need 68 full-time staff, and a total estimated budget of $10.6 million.

Portland City Councilor Eric Zimmerman, one of the five members on the city’s Community and Public Safety Committee, says PSR was “handcuffed” in previous iterations of its work.

“I think that these changes are the right changes at the right time and probably saved the program, frankly,” Zimmerman said. 

Whether PSR gets the full budget allocation requested will be determined after a series of upcoming city budget workshops.