Homeless camp sweep vote exposes rift on council
Councilor Angelita Morillo criticizes Mayor Keith Wilson after her amendment fails to pass
Members of the progressive caucus or Peacock bloc on Portland City Council thought they had seven votes lined up Wednesday to ram through a budget amendment removing funds for homeless camp sweeps.
After 4 p.m. last Friday, District 3 Councilor Angelita Morillo submitted a proposed amendment moving $4.3 million from the Impact Reduction Program, which includes camp sweeps as part of Mayor Keith Wilson’s mission to end unsanctioned camping by Dec. 1.
Enforcing the city’s public camping ban is central to Wilson’s overnight shelter system connecting people with treatment and services. But the Morillo amendment was not precise. It would have affected 169 budget line items, trimming some popular programs that provide employment and services to homeless and disadvantaged people.
Before Wednesday’s hearing on the amendment, the key seventh vote needed for a council majority, District 1 Councilor Loretta Smith, withdrew her support “because I had two BIPOC businesses call me” and advise her to do so.
So the marathon council session wrapped around three hours of citizen testimony led to a foregone conclusion.
In a 1,600-word response to the vote, Morillo questioned the integrity of the mayor, sitting silently a few feet away and remaining silent.
“I want to talk about why I don’t expect it to pass. … We have to do that because the behavior of the mayor and certain members of the city bureaucracy over recent weeks reveal some deeply troubling realities about the way that this city is currently being run.”
Although Morillo’s proposal allowed only one business day between introducing and council vote, a fast-tracking that caused District 4 Councilor Eric Zimmerman to call the process “a pile of crap” (at a public meeting the previous night) and walk out of the council meeting, an exodus followed by two other councilors, Morillo faulted the other side for not playing fair.
“We were presented with a proposal containing remarkably little detail, and we were told that it was simply a technical process and that there were no politics here. As you’ll recall, that didn’t sit too well with quite a few of us on council. And as we looked into the details, it became clear that this was in fact a political proposal. We saw a series of budgetary priorities being pursued that neither this body nor the public had weighed in on must get much less signed off on. And many of us recognize the sleight of hand, and a few of us went to work on an alternative,” Morillo said.
The opportunity Morillo and fellow caucus members seized is called the technical adjustment ordinance (TAO), which allows for mid-year budget changes.
“The goal was very simply to redirect $4.5 million away from costly, cruel and empirically failed practice of sweeping encampments and into proven-life saving services, like emergency rental assistance, food aid and resources for our immigrant communities,” she said.
“But that is not the story that the public took away. Instead, the mayor chose to deliberately mischaracterize our amendment. He portrayed it as not a targeted cut to sweeps, but as a measure that would gut a number of beloved programs, like Glitter, that would eliminate 100 jobs and would leave our streets awash in garbage.
“But instead of picking up the phone and calling me or bother checking in with the councilors who wrote the amendment, he took it upon himself to spread disinformation to the public, and city employees went directly to the workers of those programs, whose budgets they claimed were under threat, and told them that they would be cut if this amendment passed.
“The mayor effectively held those programs hostage, using them as shields for deeply problematic policy. … The fact that the mayor and city bureaucrats would engage in this sort of behavior should be of deep concern to every single one of my colleagues, because this council is tasked with a legislative agenda, and the and the executive is tasked with executing that agenda.
“And it would seem that the mayor is more interested in his own agenda than he is in working within the boundaries of our new government. … I have personally seen enough.”
After holding the floor for about 15 minutes, Morillo at last felt she had said enough.
Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney asked Mayor Wilson if he would like to speak, warning that “your staff is already two minutes over and we are paying overtime. Mr. Mayor, can you be quick?”
Wilson defended his Impact Reduction Program briefly, drawing another reminder from the chair to hurry.
“We now have kept staff five minutes over when we said we would be done,” Pirtle-Guiney said.
“Let me answer this last thing,” Wilson continued. “While you may criticize the administration, my job is to make you successful. My job is to make the city successful. I do that by thinking slow.”
Earlier in the council session, 84 citizens testified on the amendment, 68% opposing and 31% in favor. By an unofficial count of 1,108 written comments, 31% were in support.
She’s failing to read the room and being not only disingenuous, but grossly juvenile in her handling of this. The majority of citizens want to stop living with dangerous, hazardous camping as a permanent fixture in our lives. It is killing businesses and whole neighborhoods - it is also enabling the drawn out deaths of people living on the streets, who won’t choose something different until accepting assistance is the only option. As we know all too well in NW, the city has opened shelters and spent millions of dollars now on resources so people have somewhere to go that is not a tent. What they are failing to do is connect people to these resources or give them the push needed to use them. It’s a lie at this point to indicate that sweeps kill or are cruel. What is actually cruel (for all of us) is to allow what is happening to continue.
The fact that this vote was even as close as it was should be a real eye opener for voters.
Great recap of a meeting that never should have occurred. A couple observations:
1. Morillo keeps talking about "we" and "our amendment." A clear sign that the she, Mitch Green, and the other Peacocks cooked it up behind closed doors at one of their many secret meetings, and then tried to foist it upon the rest of the council and the public Friday evening- in advance of a 3 day weekend when they hoped there would be be little opportunity for the opposition to organize.
But organize they did- with the help of the Northwest Examiner, Northwest Neighborhood Association, Partnership for Progress, Future Portland, and others including Mayor Wilson to deliver a massive response: Vote NO!
2. I very much appreciated that Councilors Clark, Zimmerman, and Ryan- all opponents- voted with their feet and and left after public comment and before the vote- and didn’t have to listen to Morillo’s petulant rant when she knew she had lost.
3. Too bad that Councilor Green continued to ignore the vast majority of his constituents and supported bad public policy to the end.