Shell game

Portland Parks & Recreation (PPR)’s draft budget was reviewed by concerned citizens yesterday. Despite the meeting date being set just last week when the previous schedule was disrupted by snow, about 25 people showed up. We came from all areas of the city, with various primary issues including tennis, community gardens, six sites targeted for ongoing withdrawal of city support, and provision of parks in neighborhoods lacking them.

On the positive side: more than half a dozen PPR staff attended, available for answering specific questions. Commissioner Dan Saltzman not only gave the welcome, but stayed to the end. There was a detailed presentation on the proposal, which will allow citizens to advocate with some awareness of the bureau’s financial situation. Citizen participants remained polite and constructive, despite underlying angst over some current policies and the new proposal.

Not so good: the presentation and questions about it took so long, there wasn’t much time left for comments and concerns. In such a short time with many people, it isn’t possible to review important details and/or contributing factors. There was limited discussion of overall policy for funding parks. Neither the Parks director nor the commissioner-in-charge seemed ready to challenge the Council’s current policy of relying on levies and corporate sponsorships rather than increasing ongoing General Fund support of parks as essential services in a growing city. There was also no review of staffing and administrative structure in PPR – for example, it would have been nice to hear whether the reorganization has saved or cost money.

Some of the information presented:

PPR is a huge operation. Staff are responsible for over 300 sports fields, 100 tennis courts, 1,000 picnic tables, daily inspections at over 100 playgrounds, 175 miles of trails, 1,000 community garden plots, 180 developed parks, 61 habitat parks, and 20,000 rose bushes (and sundry other stuff – even my nurse’s rapid documentation skills couldn’t keep up).

The total PPR budget is $72 million – $40.3m from the levy and fees, $31.7m from the General Fund. PPR gets the third largest chunk of General Fund money, after Police at $123.2m and Fire’s $72.7m. All other bureaus combined received $106.2m from the General Fund in the current budget. Parks funding is about 10% of the current General Fund. About half the General Fund is raised from property taxes, with most of the rest coming from business licenses, utility taxes, and lodging taxes.

Volunteers provide one third of PPR’s workforce.

One participant asserted Portland spends half as much per capita as Beaverton or Seattle, and has half the staff per capita. Parks staff did not dispute these statistics.

A graph was shown of revenue and expenditures over the past ten years and projected for the next ten. It made no sense to me, since it failed to show a drop in revenue when the current levy expires at the end of June 2008. The levy currently funds $5m in operations and $6.8m in capital expenses annually, despite not bringing in all the revenue promised (due to compression of taxes because we passed the Children’s levy concurrently). PPR says they will conduct a public process to decide whether to seek renewal of the levy in November 2008, but gave no indication of what that process would include. The projected income graph should have shown a significant drop in 2009, but instead it continued to rise at roughly the same rate of inflation as revenue over the last five years. I didn’t get a good answer for why.

Side note: Commissioner Saltzman has talked about also putting a renewal of the Children’s levy on the ballot in 2008. Polling in 2005 showed reduced support for a parks levy if combined with a children’s levy, according to Parks Board minutes.

The Mayor did not ask bureaus to propose cut packages this year. Indeed, the next upcoming budget has $7m in ongoing new revenue and $16.4m in one-time additional money. PPR is asking for $1.4m in increased ongoing funding and $5.5m of the one-time.

And also for $6.9m in new capital projects, to add to the $47.3m in funding for projects already on the city’s Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) list. And this is where the shell game starts. The CIP budget and project list was not on the table for discussion last night, and are not reviewed in the Citywide Budget meetings listed below. And approximately $47m from the new Metro bond measure was referenced once, with no details or opportunity for questions/input. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about these things, citizens. Don’t ask about the so-called “non-discretionary” parts of the city’s budget. No need to know whether the reorganization has been cost-effective. That’s not the shell we’re peeking under tonight. Moving on…..

Most of the proposed add-packages call for long overdue maintenance and operations improvements in parks facilities already up and running. There are a few pieces for Master Planning new parks that currently have no improvements. But the proposed budget doesn’t go very far towards addressing the inequity that residents with no parks facilities near their homes pay the same property tax rates as those with adequate parks services. When will all neighborhoods in Portland have a park? What is the plan for this?

And even in neighborhoods that do have parks facilities, the new budget proposal perpetuates the unfair funding strategy the Council has chosen to implement over the past two years. Six community centers, plus the city’s two tennis centers, were targeted as “transitional sites” in the last budget. Meaning, “transitioning” out of full-funding by the city, by demanding that volunteers switch their focus from program support to fundraising, becoming self-supporting. These six are the Hillside, Sellwood, and Fulton Community Centers, Multnomah Arts Center, Pittock Mansion, and the Community Music Center. The tennis centers are already gone, axed in the last budget. Only Pittock Mansion volunteers embraced this top-down plan. At last night’s meeting, representatives from several of the other sites asked that with the improved budget outlook, their parks facilities should be restored to full funding comparable with other centers. Neither Director Zari Santner nor Parks Commissioner Saltzman agreed to advocate for this return to fair funding at Council. Their proposal is to provide $500,000 to help the sites “transition” – that’s $500,000 total, not each. It was suggested this sum could be used as an endowment fund, with sites being able to apply from grants using the interest. Let’s see, at 5% return per year, that would be $25,000, divided by six is $4,166 each. Don’t spend it all at once, volunteers.

I expect many citizens to show up at Council hearings to protest, asking the Council to revisit the whole issue of identifying and de-funding “transition sites”. “We want to know how to get off the transition list, not how to transition more effectively”, said one participant. I believe Council should reverse its policy of expecting volunteers to fund the parks facilities in their neighborhood. Not only is it not fair now, but it will inevitably lead to affluent neighborhoods being able to afford more parks programs and better facilities.

There are more details in the proposal than I can cover, especially since not all are what they seem. One add-package request is to increase funding for a second staff person in the Community Gardens program from half-time to full-time. When I congratulated an advocate for Community Gardens after the meeting, he told me the half-time position has never been filled. What happened to the money allocated for it in a previous budget?

I didn’t get the impression PPR will be changing their proposal based on citizen input last night. Some participants were assured their desires are already in the fine print, others (the transition sites) were told, essentially, “We hear you, and we’re not going to change our position”.

So now, it’s on to the Citywide Community Budget hearings:

Tuesday, Feb 6, 5:30 p.m., St. Johns Community Center, 8427 N. Central

Thursday, Feb 22, 6 p.m., Franklin High School, 5405 SE Woodward

and the final hearing,

Thursday, May 10, 6:30 p.m., Robert Gray Middle School, 5505 SW 23rd.

In the past, showing up at these hearings has made a difference. Citizens need to rally warm bodies to have many people advocating for your issue. Send letters and emails ahead of time, and have folks make phone calls to the Council offices, too. Squeaky wheel time.