Authorize Intergovernmental Agreement with Portland State University to expand and improve the Neighborhood Profiles project for amount not to exceed $61,250
The City of Portland ordains:
Section 1. The Council finds:
- The City of Portland (City) recognizes that in order for our City government to be connected and responsive to all Portlanders, we need to improve how we engage with community.
- The Office of Community & Civic Life (Civic Life) is currently working on updating the citywide engagement framework that will allow Portlanders to work with City government to create solutions for common concerns.
- This IGA will fund PSU’s Population Research Center to provide updated data and new data and visualizations to expand and improve the completed Neighborhood Profiles project (IGA 30007751). PRC will focus on updates, refinements, incorporation of public and City user feedback and addition of new data sources, and interactive delivery of the data.
- Civic Life will use these estimates to revise and update neighborhood profiles with data on a broader array of topics and for multiple characteristics jointly (cross-tabulations, e.g. language by education level). In addition, the profiles will be incorporated into an interactive data query tool that will include search and cross-neighborhood comparison functionality, and additionally include data for neighborhood coalitions and other geographic units by mutual agreement.
- The City desires to enter into an Intergovernmental Agreement with Portland State University, which has the capacity to perform community-based research concerning civic engagement.
- ORS 190.010 to 190.030 authorizes units of local government in the state of Oregon to enter into written agreements with any other unit or units of local government for the performance of any or all functions and activities that any of them has the authority to perform.
NOW, THEREFORE, the Council directs:
- The Director of the Office of Community & Civic Life is authorized to execute an intergovernmental agreement with Portland State University in an amount not to exceed $61,250 provided it has been approved as to form by the City Attorney.
- The Director of the Office of Community & Civic Life is authorized to amend the intergovernmental agreement with Portland State University, provided such amendments have been approved as to form by the City Attorney.
Official Record (Efiles)
An ordinance when passed by the Council shall be signed by the Auditor. It shall be carefully filed and preserved in the custody of the Auditor (City Charter Chapter 2 Article 1 Section 2-122)
Passed as amended by Council
Auditor of the City of Portland
Mary Hull Caballero
Impact Statement
Purpose of Proposed Legislation and Background Information
Civic Life is currently engaging Portlanders as part of updating the City’s engagement framework. The current system began in 1974 and was augmented in 2008 but has not been fully adjusted for programmatic efficacy since then. The purpose of the City’s numerous apparatuses for civic engagement is to ensure that ALL Portlanders are engaged in the decisions that most impact their lives. However, the framework is poorly understood and its underlying approaches are unclear. This results in uneven community engagement within and between bureaus and often times deficient community engagement and discord between residents and their City.
Civic Life’s strategic planning process, called the Portland Engagement Project, includes a wide array of assessments and alignments internal to the City as well as with the public. An important facet of this update is to provide updated data-rich neighborhood and district profiles in order to understand the demographics and social ecology of each of our neighborhoods. The data for these profiles comes from 2010, 2020 Census, 2016-2020 American Community Survey, Feeding America food insecurity data sets, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention among other data sets. Data will be publicly available, accessible through Portland Maps, searchable, and coordinated with other bureaus and agencies throughout the region.
Financial and Budgetary Impacts
As part of FY 21/22 Spring BMP, Council authorized the one-time use of $648,000 in personnel savings to update the City’s engagement system. In addition to this IAG for the data rich neighborhood profiles, another accompanies this in a separate ordinance to fund Portland State University, Center for Public Service/Oregon’s Kitchen Table to organize and facilitate a summit on community engagement and urban co-governance in the amount of $108,850. Additional contracts for this work include our principal engagement consulting group PreGame for internal and external listening, design and plan development in the amount of $149,000 and Centre for Public Impact for $70,000 to facilitate the launch of a cohort training program for our engagement practitioner network across all bureaus.
Community Impacts and Community Involvement
This is the second year of work on these updated data rich neighborhood profiles with the PRC. In year one we worked to gather the data and modify them to fit into our geographic neighborhood boundaries. In the past 3 months, Civic Life releases the draft profiles for a public comment period and received over a hundred suggestions and points of clarification. During this next phase of the project with this IGA, we will work to incorporate the suggestions into static profiles and search results.
Even in their beta form, these profiles form the basis for the engagement framework because engagement begins with knowing who lives in our neighborhoods. For example, one neighborhood association has already started outreach in other language, has formed a committee for young people because the profile showed a great increase in non-English speaking families in their neighborhood. Similarly, the district profiles show that outer East district, served by East Portland Coalition Office, is composed of more people that all of the West side of our City. Further, the outer East district is the most linguistically and ethnically diverse and the most economically distressed. This data will inform outreach, language access, and service deliver decisions for the coming decade.
100% Renewable Goal
Not applicable.
Financial and Budget Analysis
This legislation will allow Civic Life contract with PSU for the updated Portland Neighborhood Profiles project. During FY 2021-22 Spring BMP, Council authorized approximately $648,000 in carryover resources for Civic Life to update the City’s community engagement system. Civic Life built these resources into their FY 2022-23 Budget and will have sufficient resources to support the contract with PSU.