Reflections on the Fall TAO
Last week, City Council took up efforts to adjust our current fiscal year budget. The item before Council is called the Fall TAO (technical adjustment ordinance). It’s like a mini budget session: councilors offer amendments during the TAO to tweak the budget as we approach the halfway point of the fiscal year.
You may have heard about an amendment that I put forward, along with my colleague Councilor Mitch Green. This amendment was an extension of something my office worked on this Spring during the marathon budget sessions. My amendment, Morillo 1, sought to change Portland’s approach to homelessness by redirecting a portion of funding for camp sweeps into lifesaving services like rental assistance and food access. This was an urgent priority for me during the TAO adjustment because Mayor Wilson recently began enforcing a camping ban and intensifying sweeps on November 1st – a move that housing navigators and community-based service providers have expressed severe concerns about.
I want to set the record straight on what happened with the TAO and with Morillo 1.
While Mayor Wilson has falsely claimed that our amendment would cut services that keep our streets clean, the truth is that our proposal challenged the ineffective and wasteful practice of sweeping Portlanders from sidewalk to sidewalk without ever addressing the root of the problem. Contrary to the narrative from the Mayor’s Office, our amendment kept funding for services like trash abatement and job support while expanding grants for housing and food assistance, immigrant and refugee services, and public safety improvements.
 To be frank, I was disappointed in the misinformation being spread by the Mayor – not just in his newsletter, but by his personal outreach to community organizations that I love and support like Ground Score’s GLITTER program and PDX Saints Love. Without consulting our office, Mayor Wilson contacted community organizations warning them that Morillo 1 would cut their funding. But what he failed to mention was that those cuts were introduced by his office, not ours. In fact, the Morillo 1 amendment clarifies the cuts to sweeps are to be applied solely to campsite removals. The language further clarifies that programs such as hazardous waste removal, GLITTER, or sidewalk cleaning cannot be cut to meet the reduction to “campsite removals” contemplated in the Morillo 1 amendment.
I was also surprised to hear pushback from colleagues who were unsatisfied with the amount of time they were given to review the amendment. Not only is this something that I proposed in the May budget negotiations, I also posted my amendment 5 days prior to the vote at Council and offered one-on-one briefings for my fellow Councilors.
This was a light load to carry compared with our May budget session, during which we received massive 300 page binders that we only had two weeks to go through. No one raised issues about process then. I’m surprised and disheartened by the response to my TAO amendment because I believe the ability to read and understand budget amendments is a cornerstone of our duties as the fiscal body of the city.
I received a lot of feedback from Portlanders about this amendment, and although my amendment wasn’t successful in getting passed, I want to express my gratitude to every constituent who shared their thoughts on this. What’s clear to me is that, despite having different strategies on how to get there, we all want the same thing: we want our streets to be clean and safe, and we want our neighbors to have a stable place to live.
Ultimately, here's why I introduced the amendment: at a time when our wealth disparity is greater than that of the Gilded Age and our neighbors are being kidnapped from school pickup lines by men in masks, it’s unconscionable that we as a City would choose to further criminalize people for being poor, unhoused, or simply down on their luck. It’s time our leadership took responsibility for reducing homelessness for real, rather than just shuffle people around the city in an endless, wasteful cycle. I believe that we can house people if we have the political will to do so.
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