As the city commissioner in charge of emergency response dispatching, he said he also wants to ensure that operators are ready for a Portland Street Response expansion
Portland City Commissioner Mingus Mapps may be a newly elected official, but he’s not new to city government. The former political science professor challenged his former boss, Chloe Eudaly, and won her seat. She oversaw the Office of Community & Civic Life when he worked there, leading the city’s crime prevention program. He was terminated from that job and has said his experience working in the troubled bureau led him to seek a position on City Council.
Backed by the city’s neighborhood associations and the police union, Mapps ran as a moderate candidate who would listen to Portlanders who felt ignored by Eudaly and other farther-left-leaning city commissioners. He won with 56% of the vote.
As commissioner, he now oversees the Water Bureau, the Bureau of Environmental Service and the Bureau of Emergency Communications.
Our interview with Mapps is the third in our series on the City Council’s trio of new commissioners. Previously, we interviewed Dan Ryan and Carmen Rubio. We asked each of them about their goals for their first year in office — a year filled with unprecedented challenges.
Joe Opaleski: What is your biggest policy priority for the year?
Mingus Mapps: My biggest policy priority for 2021 is helping the city survive and move out of the COVID crisis. There are many different dimensions to this crisis. It has everything to do with, first and foremost, keeping people healthy and trying to flatten that curve. We also know there are economic pieces to this, too. If you spend any time downtown or in our business districts, we see that Portland is economically struggling, and I want to help folks get back to work and help these businesses to survive. Most importantly, I want to help individual Portlanders survive.
One of my top priorities for this coming year is to get rental assistance dollars in aid to landlords out the door as quickly as possible. One of my goals was to make sure that no one loses their home because of the COVID crisis. As we get toward the end of the year, I hope that we come up with a plan to head off what I fear will be a looming eviction crisis.
At some point, when the moratorium on evictions expires, we are going to have an enormous challenge. Probably 20% or more Portlanders are behind on their rents, and trying to catch up quickly is going to be technically impossible, so what do we do in that situation? We have some ideas that we’re kicking around, but we don’t have any solid policies yet.
Opaleski: If it were completely up to you, what would be the first thing you do in order to protect people from evictions?
Mapps: First, let’s get rental assistance dollars from the federal level, the state level and the local level out to real people. I think we did an OK job with that in 2020. This year, I want to expand it to make sure we get those dollars out to landlords, too. I also think it’s very important that we maintain the moratorium on evictions until our society is, frankly, stabilized.
Opaleski: Is there a timeline for when we’d be able to roll out some of the things that you just mentioned?
Mapps: The rent relief and aid to landlords is in the pipeline already. We already have a system for getting rent relief out. I believe we still have to invent a system to get aid to landlords out, but I know that we’re working on those, and I’m fairly confident that we’re going to get those systems up and running right away.
We might be in a position where we need to extend the eviction moratorium until later in the season. I think we have another year at least of this COVID crisis ahead of us, so I think it’s a bit naive to think that come March, we are going to be in a position where it makes sense to start kicking people out of their homes, if that ever makes sense.
[Editors Note: The statewide eviction moratorium has been extended to June 30, prohibiting in most cases eviction for nonpayment or without cause until July 1.]
Opaleski: You talked about the pipeline of getting dollars to landlords and to tenants. What would giving those payments actually look like, and is there an equation for how much that would actually be?
Mapps: We have a system already. I think in 2020, we made a big emphasis on contracting with local service providers to get emergency rental assistance out to the doors. I’m sure we will continue that program.
One of my concerns is that we were, over the course of 2020, we were too slow to get those dollars out the door. I think by the end, we got most of those funds out, but I would have liked to have seen us do better on a day-to-day basis.
Aid to landlords, I believe the deal there is if landlords are willing to accept 80% of the past-due rent, they need to forgive the balance.
I think it’s really important to focus on both the supply and the demand side of this problem. In other words, both support people who are renters and support small mom and pop landlords who just have a couple of units — but at this point, we may be housing folks who haven’t been able to pay their rent for almost a year.
I know at some point, we may really see people lose homes, which also means that we are likely to lose affordable rental spaces. So I want to make sure that program works.
(According to the Portland Office of Management and Finance, the funds in the pipeline Mapps was referring to is the $19.6 million in Emergency Rent Assistant Program funds the city received from the U.S. Treasury.)
Opaleski: In yesterday’s (Jan. 21) City Council meeting, you also mentioned helping with COVID-19 vaccines, ensuring a speedier rollout. But is it safe to say that your main priority is protecting renters and landlords at this moment?
Mapps: You know this is a situation where we have to have multiple main priorities. The solution here is ultimately to conquer this virus, so we have to get that vaccine into people’s arms. At the same time, we have to mitigate the harm that’s caused by this virus, both at a biological level and societal level.
I think one of the most acute forms of that harm is people not being able to work, and therefore not being able to pay rent and then losing their homes. Digging out from that is just such a heavy wedge that I think we need to do everything that we possibly can to avoid it. This is just a situation where we have a mathematical impossibility, and have two or more top priorities.
Opaleski: You proposed involving the fire department, or other emergency services, in administering COVID-19 vaccines. How would you initiate that, and is it being done elsewhere?
Mapps: We’ve got paramedics and firefighters who are trained at administering vaccines. I know Commissioner (Jo Ann) Hardesty has offered those folks up, and I hope that eventually we’ll figure out how to make that happen.
We’re also beginning to launch some mass vaccination programs here in Portland. I think we just rolled a new one out today, but there will be some opportunities coming up in the next couple of weeks for people to drive into a big parking lot and get a vaccine while you sit in the car, for example, or go down to the Convention Center. If I recall correctly, that might be one of our mass vaccination spots. So we’re making progress there, but one of my concerns is that we need to move a lot more quickly.
Even if we are doing really well and meeting our goals, it’s still going to take us about a year or more to vaccinate everybody in Portland. So the faster we get that job done, the faster we can begin our healing and recovery.
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Opaleski: What specific policy actions do you want to accomplish in your bureau portfolio this year?
Mapps: All of (my bureaus) are really important, like fundamental city services that need to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that’s an important challenge, and we need to meet that standard.
BOEC (Bureau of Emergency Communications) is particularly important. That’s basically 911. One of the things we’re really focused on now is supporting the (Portland) Street Response teams. That’s an innovative program that we’re rolling out in Lents to help our houseless neighbors out there. As you know, the notion here is that instead of sending out a cop to deal with someone who is on the streets having a mental health crisis, we send down a social worker and someone trained in conflict de-escalation. (The first team consists of a social worker and firefighter EMT.) That’s a great program; it’s basically housed in the fire department. But 911 is a huge piece of this because when those calls come in, we have to figure out what to do with them. Can we send out a Street Response team, or is this a call that requires response by the police or the fire department, too? And the training needs here are actually way more complex than you would expect.
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But our team over at BOEC has been working really hard and working very collaboratively. We’re going to be ready as the program rolls out, and indeed the program is rolling out as we speak. In addition to that, we are doing the hard work that we need to do to make sure that when we expand our response teams, 911 is ready.
It takes us about 18 months to train someone who takes 911 calls, so if we want to expand the street response teams to citywide, let’s say in a year or so, we need to be training people about six months ago, and we’re doing all the stuff that we can to meet that need. The bottleneck in expanding the Street Response teams is not going to be our bureau (BOEC), if we have anything to say about it.
My other two bureaus are Water and Environmental Services, again, during this time these are mammoth public works projects, so one of the challenges that we have is to maintain these amazing machines that stretch over 30 miles of land or so. We need to replace pipes and clear clogged pipes and do all that very mechanical stuff at a time when I think our environmental services funds are down. (According to the Water Bureau, the balance of water bills outstanding for more than 30 days is about $25 million. In March of 2020, outstanding bills equaled about $13 million. The increase in outstanding funds the department is attributing to COVID-19 is about $12 million.)
Our fundamental challenge with both water and sewer is to maintain the system so people get clean water, and then we can also take wastewater and stormwater and clean it and recycle it and get it back into nature, while at the same time making sure that people can afford their water and sewer bills. And I get that those are under the best of circumstances difficult bills to pay sometimes. That’s why we’re really focused right now on developing programs that help low-income folks pay their water and sewer bills.
Opaleski: What would the timeline for that rollout look like?
Mapps: Fast. We already have programs to help folks who had trouble paying their water and sewer bills. One of the disappointments there is that there’s not enough take-up of that.
I think a lot of folks don’t realize that those programs are available, so we’re already working to do a lot of public education around services that people can tap into to dramatically reduce the amount they have to pay for water and sewer.
And then long term, one of the challenges here is that if you live in a multi-family unit, if you live in an apartment building, your water meter might not break down your water usage by individual apartments. It’s hard to tell, No. 1, how much a low-income household is using instead. It tends to get stretched out over the entire building.
If we could get smart water meters installed, we could do a much better job of delivering rebates to low-income folks, and we’re working on that, but I’ll also tell you, that’s a tricky and complicated infrastructure problem. We literally have to build new buildings that have smart water meters on them, and we need to provide incentives for landlords to go through and replace the old-school water meters that everyone is currently using — but we’re working on it, and eventually we’ll get there. But certainly, we can expand and educate the public about our programs to help people pay their water bills.
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