City Council Held Their Noses and Passed a Budget—Now They Want Changes

The city of Portland approved its budget last week, but that doesn’t mean efforts to avoid impending cuts are over.

Hours after Portland City Council approved an $8.5 billion 2026-27 budget last Wednesday evening, five city councilors brought forward an ordinance to restore some of the frontline services Mayor Keith Wilson eliminated in the budget. It’s a pared down version of a budget amendment that failed along increasingly clear party lines, including six councilors who consistently vote together on more moderate and conservative positions, and six councilors who vote together on progressive policy.

Councilors Candace Avalos, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Angelita Morillo have introduced an ordinance they say represents a compromise of previous attempts to pause a layoff process for 48 positions for one year. The new budget begins July 1, and layoffs are scheduled to take effect August 3.

Meanwhile, another attempt to raid funds in Portland’s new police accountability office through a separate ordinance is expected to be introduced this week, according to multiple city councilors who spoke to the Mercury since the budget was adopted.

Prior versions of the legislation were introduced as budget amendments, but like most of this year’s budget proposals, they failed to reach a majority vote.

Council President Jamie Dunphy confirmed to the Mercury Tuesday that each of the new proposals are based on previous budget amendments: one proposed by Council Vice President Olivia Clark and Councilors Elana Pirtle-Guiney, Steve Novick, Dan Ryan, and Loretta Smith—called “Public Safety Programs Restoration”— and another proposed by Green, Avalos, and Morillo, called “Services First.”

Importantly, if councilors’ votes on either of the new ordinances were to end in a tie, Wilson could play the role of tiebreaker. That sets up a dynamic in which he could cast a deciding vote to backpedal on cuts he proposed in his own budget. It would be the first opportunity for Wilson to break a Council tie, as the city does not allow the mayor to break a tie on budget amendments.

Dunphy said he would prefer to avoid that, and that he was scheduling a mid-July work session for councilors to come up with a compromise version that could achieve similar results. By Wednesday, that idea was off the table, due to “scheduling mostly,” according to Dunphy.

The immediate post-budget adoption tweak is unconventional, but councilors found themselves in a tough position after approving the budget without major adjustments. Further, the city’s chief financial officer, Jonas Biery, had warned councilors that any amendments to the budget after June 17 could severely slow down and jeopardize the city’s ability to implement changes before the legal deadline of July 1.

Biery said amending the budget after June 17 would be “extremely dangerous and high risk behavior,” noting city employees would be under strain to make the necessary changes on a condensed timeline.

So, councilors approved the budget in a 10-2 vote, and immediately got to work finding other avenues. The ordinances brought forward aren’t amendments. But they could still save jobs slated to be cut in the recently approved budget by using dollars that are not yet allocated.

Details on the moderates’ proposal are sparse. Dunphy said he had not seen the text as of Tuesday, but it has been filed and is in the legal review process.

More details are available on the progressives’ proposal, which was announced last Thursday. It would delay or save cuts to jobs, including 13 Parks and Recreation maintenance positions, a program for seniors, and two city customer service 311 jobs. It would also restore 12 Portland Police Bureau (PPB) positions, commonly called “PS3s;” which are unarmed assistants who help search for missing persons, respond to minor car crashes, and assist with other low-priority 911 calls. Three Portland Fire and Rescue life support vehicles would also be saved under the proposal—a priority all councilors raised during budget discussions.

“We owe it to Portlanders to keep working on this,” Kanal stated in a June 18 press release. “East and Southeast Portlanders deserve 24/7 Fire Rescue service. We need a holistic public safety system which includes unarmed responders. And we must ensure that Portlanders get the Parks system they are entitled to—and which they voted for by approving the Parks Levy.”

In 2025, Portlanders approved a levy for the city’s parks bureau that is expected to raise $456 million over five years. But even with that anticipated funding stream, Wilson dramatically cut parks maintenance jobs and funding. A handful of prior proposals to stave off cuts to parks funding failed largely along the common 6-6 tie. Wilson also cut public safety positions, including the unarmed responders, and advanced life support specialists. 

Many of the cuts are a result of a long term project the city is currently undergoing to align city jobs with a new government structure that began in 2025. Year over year, it will move positions and ideally remove inefficiencies or duplicate roles. But critics say many of the jobs on the chopping block are specialized positions, and the city administration should be more precise before making cuts that could prove harmful in the long run. 

“Breaking our government system and fixing it later is not efficiency, it’s the local version of DOGE,” Morillo said in a June 18 press release. “We owe it to City workers and to the people of Portland to preserve these core services and to do our government realignment right the first time, with workers alongside us.”

Other previous proposals sought to save some of the same positions, but would have used funding from a voter-approved Office of Community-based Police Accountability, which has faced structural obstacles to getting started. Clark, Pirtle-Guiney, Novick, Ryan, and Smith’s “Public Safety Programs Restoration” proposal would have moved $10 million from the Police Accountability office to PPB for training, administrative staff, unarmed responders, as well as fire and rescue vehicles, victims services and more.

Yet another previous amendment from Pirtle-Guiney and Novick, would have pulled $7.9 million from 2025-26 PCEF interest and other contingency funds, but would also fund $1.7 million in training for PPB, including deescalation training and crowd control.

Progressive councilors were not willing to move money from the fledgling police accountability office to PPB during the budget cycle. For Councilor Ryan, the police accountability funds were a big enough sticking point to impact his vote on the entire budget. He was one of two councilors who voted no on Wilson’s budget, saying if the money had come from that office, he would have voted yes.

“If the amendment Councilor Clark, myself, and others had passed to spend $8 to $10 million of unused money collecting dust, in my opinion, over the next year to bring back the public safety system to include police and fire, I would have been a clear yes today,” Ryan said. “It was simple, legal, and fiscally responsible. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”

It’s unclear exactly when Council might take a vote on either ordinance, or a new compromise ordinance. Details on the new proposal are expected in the coming days.