“Today, in these urgent times, I will describe how my proposed fiscal year budget, along with my emergency declarations and other city program improvements, make the best of our horse and buggy form of city government, by cutting red-tape and breaking down siloes to better achieve real, tangible outcomes on community safety, homelessness, city clean up and job creation that comes from successful local businesses,” -Mayor Wheeler.
Mayor Ted Wheeler delivered his annual State of the City address on May 6, 2022—an event sponsored by the City Club of Portland—where he provided his vision and set of actions to improve the city through the lenses of equity, climate goals, and high-performance government.
This address builds upon the proposed budget investments he proposed to the City Council earlier this week.
- He announced his next Emergency Declaration to be signed next week, noting his earlier Emergency Declarations focused on improving and speeding up services to Portlanders experiencing outdoor homelessness, and to moving unsheltered Portlanders away from high crash corridors. He announced his next Emergency Declaration will improve the cleanup of the city, unrelated to homelessness. This will streamline the work and accountability for cleaning up the city – dealing with trash, graffiti, illegal dumping, abandoned cars and more. It focuses on cleanup work apart from—and outside of—occupied outdoor homeless camps. It puts one centralized command structure over 20 city programs and 8 bureaus, that are currently managed by five different city council members.
- He also announced moving the Crime Prevention Program (currently in the Office of Community and Civic Life) and the Office of Violence Prevention (currently within Mayor’s office) into the new Community Safety Division. This builds upon his commitment to further the City’s focus on gun violence.
- He also identified Portland’s estimated affordable housing gap—20,487—a $6.5B funding challenge that will need to be addressed through a private, government and nonprofit action plan. The Mayor announced this problem as a root-cause of many of the inequalities and housing issues impacting the City today. This issue will be a priority for his administration as they fight to build additional affordable housing (particularly in East Portland) and preserve affordability in neighborhoods across the city. Wheeler invited a diverse coalition of stakeholders to come up with a plan to fight housing gentrification.
- He issued a plea from state leadership to release ballot measure 110 funding and prioritize mental health program reform in next year’s state legislative session. He announced that within the coming weeks, he will be co-convening a series of public dialogues with County Chair Deborah Kafoury and State Legislators who are already working on these issues, to focus support on needed mental health and substance abuse reforms during the 2023 state legislative session.
You can view Mayor Wheeler's prepared remarks here: