If budgets are how a city demonstrates its values, city leadership must show it values Portland Street Response.
Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s office has proposed shunting three million dollars from Portland Street Response to Portland Fire and Rescue, according to Shane Kavanaugh in the Oregonian on Feb. 2.
How much this leaves for Portland Street Response is unclear, but likely somewhere between two and four million dollars, far short of what it would take for Portland Street Response to run six vans every day, all day.
In 2022, the city projected it needed $8.5 million to run Portland Street Response at that level. When I asked for a rough number of what we should aim for so Portland Street Response could be fully operational, Commissioner Renee Gonzalez’s chief of staff Shah Smith estimated about $16 million would be needed.
Portland Street Response funding has been difficult to track. About $10 million per year was budgeted for the past two years — gathered from general funds, opiate settlement funds that run out next year, and American Rescue Plan Act funds that ran out this year — but that money was lodged under various line items in the fire department.
Since Portland Street Response is operating only during daytime hours and with too few teams, likely less than that budgeted amount was spent on Portland Street Response, but rather reallocated within the fire department.
That would be a breach of the good faith of residents who were led to believe that those funds went to Portland Street Response.
This year, any shell games of the past might amount to a more explicit transfer of funds from Portland Street Response to the fire department.
City leaders are casting Portland Street Response’s future as a zero-sum game between it and the fire department. It doesn’t have to be that way, and shouldn’t.
Launched as a pilot in Lents in 2019 and expanded citywide in 2021, Portland Street Response is grafted onto the fire department because it has a strong infrastructure for crisis medical response dispatched from the Bureau of Emergency Communications.
Most of Portland Street Response’s calls are reclassified from former police dispatch calls, not fire. Setting up the budget for Portland Street Response in competition with the rest of Portland Fire and Rescue dooms it to failure, and Commissioner Gonzalez is telegraphing exactly that intent.
Mayor Ted Wheeler should make clear that Portland Street Response is not in competition with the Portland Fire Bureau, even if it is still housed there for the time being.
Under the new form of government, Portland Fire and Rescue will be under the public safety division, so once Portland Street Response is no longer fledging, it could be its own bureau in the same division.
Even if city leaders aren’t showing they value Portland Street Response, residents do. Budget season is here, and it’s time to make our voices heard.
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