“Reducing transparency will make it harder to gain support for the types of changes that will be necessary.”
– David Stein, former committee member
The Portland Bureau of Transportation will no longer have a dedicated advisory committee to watchdog and help flesh out its budget. It’s a step the City of Portland is taking as a cost-cutting and efficiency measure as it leans into the new form of government that will begin January 1, 2025.
But those dynamics are precisely why two former members of the PBOT Bureau Budget Advisory Committee (BBAC) we’ve spoken to are not happy about the decision.
On September 16th, bureau Director Millicent Williams sent an email to people who follow the work of the PBOT BBAC and its members, stating, “I am writing to let you know that PBOT will be dissolving the committee and we will not reconvene this September… The city budget process will be different moving forward, among many other changes,” Williams explains in the email.
Williams also mentioned “severe fiscal constraints,” “staff capacity constraints” and a, “need to continue to seek efficiencies” as reasons for her decision.
The BBAC costs the city money because it has a PBOT staff liaison and there’s also time and resources involved in prepping and holding the frequent meetings. Williams pointed to an August 5th memo from Mayor Ted Wheeler that laid out another grim financial outlook for the city budget in the upcoming 2024-2025 fiscal year.
Wheeler’s memo said bureau budget advisory committees are no longer required, but he left the option of dissolving them up to individual bureau directors.
Williams opted to get rid of the BBAC, an active committee that had 17 members representing different modes, labor unions, and interested citizens. She said, “this decision was not made lightly” but that she looks forward to the city’s “new engagement structure” once the transition is complete.
One former member of the PBOT BBAC, David Stein, said he thinks Williams made the wrong decision. “It was surprising to hear that the committee was being dissolved. In light of the Mayor’s unusual warning just last month about the dire prospects for the coming fiscal year, this would also seem to be an unnecessary risk,” Stein shared in an email to BikePortland.
Stein said since the two other bureaus in the Public Works service area — Environmental Services and Water — haven’t dissolved their budget committees, “now puts PBOT at a distinct disadvantage.”
Without assurance about what the new engagement process will look like, Stein feels that the change in government — which includes an expansion of city council members from five to 12 and an entire new wing of government under the city administrator’s office — makes the need of the PBOT BBAC more important than ever and “add uncertainty” to the process.
“None of the structural problems with PBOT’s funding were solved last year and reducing transparency will make it harder to gain support for the types of changes that will be necessary if the bureau, and Public Works more broadly, is going to provide the services that people expect,” Stein said.
But beyond Wheeler’s blessing, Williams has the City’s transition team to lean on. A report released this month from the Government Transition Advisory Committee titled, Recommendations to City Leaders of the New Government included 17 specific recommendations.
One of them was to, “dissolve bureau-specific budget advisory committees.” Their recommendation seems to be based, not on whether or not the committees are valuable and necessary, but because feedback from members and staff, “Consistently found the committees ineffective due to lack of training, information, time to do their work, and authority.”
That tracked with one former PBOT BBAC committee member who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely about the committee. “It’s unfortunate… But on the other hand, PBOT did seem to just treat the committee as obligatory rather than a place to truly get advice or ideas. So in the end I guess we’re all just getting our time back.”
Thanks for reading.
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Big mistake. The Bureau/Budget committees were imposed because internal staff and department heads were regularly bypassing bureau directors on lobbying for more city funds by contacting influential members of the public, so the BAC process was designed to make this lobbying more open and transparent. Now the city will go back to the process that most cities use of backroom deals, media leaks, and small-time bribes. All government is corrupt, it simply can’t operate otherwise, so we have to choose our form of corruption wisely, and the BAC process was IMO the most transparent choice.
Or you could argue that the BAC process was a fig leaf to cover the backroom deals, media leaks, and small-time bribes that continue to this day!
Thank you for catching this. The idea of district-specific staffers to route neighborhood requests and projects within PBOT has been discussed, even pre-the charter reform.
In the future, we expect that neighborhood association and commissioner constituent services requests would be routed and tracked as they merge into internal PBOT lists based on budget pools, timelines, and funding sources. District commissioners cannot replace the neighborhood associations, our fine-grain sensor network.
We would benefit from those capital project lists to be online and public. Of course at PBOT most project list items are not funded.
All the bureaus/area directors with geo-specific projects and programs need the same public-facing system: PBOT, BES, Parks, Safety, and Planning should have assigned district staffers.
The taxpayers and residents are the customers of the bureaus. It is to the advantage of the bureaus to communicate with their customers. If they do not, their narrative will be written by their critics.
The BAC are usually smart volunteers willing to dig into the budget in a quantitative and qualitative way. They are an excellent point for our local media to research and communicate the bureau plans to the wider public. The public budgets are not a substitute.
In my experience on the PBOT Budget/Bureau Advisory Committee (2009-15) was that the smarter bureau directors would use the TBAC to test new programs and press releases with the committee first before releasing it to the public. In several instances the TBAC was able to save the bureau a lot of embarrassment given the representation by neighborhood coalitions, unions, business associations, related agencies, the modal nonprofits, and (regularly sitting in the audience) the press.
However, given the huge U-turns that PBOT has made in the last couple of years, I’d say that the bureau hasn’t been smart lately in their use of the TBAC and their announcement doesn’t surprise me, though I think they’ll regret it later on.
Is it really such a loss? My experience with Portland public advisory bodies is that they are 99% performative. They exist to provide The Illusion of Inclusion™, which allows officials to say “The public was involved” without having to integrate or even acknowledge their contributions and ideas and expertise.
It seems that the input of citizen advisory committees is routinely ignored in Portland. I feel like most issues have already been decided and public input is just a charade. Then the city says there was citizen involvement but it wasn’t meaningful in any way, shape or form.
This is the another step in the new form of Portland’s government. If the government is run by professionals based on best practices there is no need for citizen input. We are a long way from believing people are capable of self-government. Welcome to the new Hamiltonian government by an elite that most of the rest of the country has already adopted. I think a lot of people are going to be shocked by their inability to influence government decisions.
I think some people think being on an advisory committee gives them power. But the only power they have is the wisdom of their advice and the ability to persuade. Being on the committee gives them the opportunity to exercise that power.
Advisory committees are only one element in the decision and not by any means the most important. But eliminating them is a huge blow to citizen involvement. A lot of the cycling infrastructure taken for granted in Portland wouldn’t exist without the persistent efforts of people on local advisory committees.
I remember one volunteer who served in the 1990’s for several years on TPAC, the metro transportation advisory committee. She described recognizing that her support for pedestrian and cycling infrastructure was a minority view. So she made it her purpose to find a reason at every meeting to mention it. By the time she left the committee members where pitching their projects value to pedestrians and cyclists. She had changed the culture of the professional transportation community in Portland.
Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.
In general PBOT (and all other public agencies – I’m not trying to pick on PBOT on this post) has already decided how it’s going to spend this year’s money – there’s not much “discretionary funding” or room to move around in. Most of next year’s money has also been earmarked but there’s a bit of extra funds that haven’t yet been committed anywhere – the “discretionary funds” that politicians latch onto, and if you are a smart neighborhood activist or modal nonprofit, you too look at those funds covetously. The further down the pipeline you look, the more funds that are available that aren’t yet “committed” for any one project (or to pay debt on past projects.) Many of us who served on the various BACs and other committees would try to maneuver those funds towards our organizations, districts, or perceived constituents (for me, “bicyclists in East Portland”), but some of us would actually try to plan 5, 10, even 20 years into the future, get projects onto the TSP, STIP, MTIP, and neighborhood plans so that when an opportunity came up (and they inevitably eventually will, you gotta have faith), we would be ready to grab this federal grant, that state grant, even local matching SDC funds, part of that slimy back-room wheeling and dealing that Fred’s fig leaf covers. I still periodically see projects that we got into past PBOT budgets a decade ago finally getting built, it often takes that long, but you have to be patient – and generally the people who stay on these committees year after year are VERY patient – those who leave after a year or two are utterly discouraged by the slow pace of change, and I get that, but good luck on trying to change the internal bureaucratic systems.
Disappointing but not surprising. PBOT has had a severe allergy to public involvement for a long time. The bureau prefers to unilaterally pick improvement projects and spend money as if it belongs to PBOT and not the residents/taxpayers who provided it. The public is generally viewed as an annoyance – not a partner.
“PBOT did seem to just treat the committee as obligatory rather than a place to truly get advice or ideas. So in the end I guess we’re all just getting our time back.”
This was exactly my feeling at the end my time on the Bicycle Advisory Committee.