$18 million cut to Portland police budget not possible without layoffs, city analysis shows

Portland police

Several Portland police officers respond to the scene of a crime in SE Portland. (Mark Graves/The Oregonian)Mark Graves


A proposal to divert $18 million from the Portland police budget up for City Council consideration this week would require layoffs, a city budget analysis shows.

But the bureau also has room to lower spending by canceling or delaying purchases of materials and outside services and redeploying officers from specialty units to help with protests and patrols to cut use of overtime, the analysis found.

It’s unclear from the City Budget Office report, released Tuesday, exactly how many millions could be cut before police layoffs would be necessary. The city’s budget director and principal financial analyst wrote that their projections are a “low confidence” estimate, as they would need more time and information to produce more precise projections.

The scope of layoffs needed and the impacts that could have on police operations would depend on choices by the Police Bureau and the commissioner in charge, Mayor Ted Wheeler, they wrote.

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty and Commissioner Chloe Eudaly jointly proposed the $18 million cut. They are the only members of the five-person council who’ve publicly expressed support for the plan and the only ones who’ve proposed more budget cuts to the Police Bureau.

It comes in the wake of Tuesday’s election, which saw Wheeler defeat mayoral challenger Sarah Iannarone, and Eudaly unseated by her opponent Mingus Mapps. Wheeler has publicly rejected the idea of taking more money from the Police Bureau, saying he didn’t believe more cuts would improve public safety.

The council adopted an annual Portland police budget of $229 million in June. Nearly $170 million of that is dedicated to staffing costs, making personnel cuts a likely key part of achieving such a large cut in the middle of the fiscal year, the memo said. The bureau has many vacancies, but it is already banking on the savings from those vacant positions to help pay for millions in increased overtime driven largely by protests and retirement payouts.

At its current spending rate, the city budget office expects the police bureau could go over its approved spending plan by as much as $7 million. That includes close to $20 million alone in overtime, retirement and comp time pay, the memo said. Eliminating the money linked to vacant positions would likely increase the bureau’s over-spending, the analysis said.

“Beyond laying off employees, the bureau’s only other notable current point of potential operational discretion is to pursue significant reductions in overtime, particularly for shift backfill and protest overtime,” the memo said.

[Read the memo]

City budget officials performed the analysis at the request of Wheeler, Commissioner Amanda Fritz and Commissioner Dan Ryan. The council was in the midst of its regular fall budget adjustments, a process that typically allows city elected leaders to review and approve what are typically slight changes to the overall city budget.

But Hardesty and Eudaly rejected incremental change and proposed the city reduce the police budget by $18 million and divert the majority of those funds to city coronavirus relief efforts. They wanted that cut on top of an earlier vote that Fritz and Wheeler supported to cut $15 million from the police budget.

The other three commissioners' unease with that plan prompted them to seek the city finance experts' analysis. The trio also postponed a vote on the proposal from last Wednesday until this Thursday.

Hardesty’s and Eudaly’s plan proposed cutting vacant police positions, eliminating the budgets for the bureau’s rapid response team and Special Emergency Response Team, reducing overtime and other plans to reach $18 million. But they said they did not seek any layoffs of existing staff.

More than 150 people testified about more proposed changes to city spending last Wednesday, including many who voiced support for cutting $18 million or more from the police agency. When the council voted to postpone the vote for a week Hardesty called it “a very cowardly move.”

Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said last Thursday that he believed the $18 million cut would lead to layoffs, more units being eliminated, longer response times to 911 calls, delay crime investigations and hamper training and diversity initiatives. He specifically named about 10 units that could be on the chopping block to reach $18 million, including the traffic division, behavioral health unit, service coordination team, community engagement unit and neighborhood response teams. None of them were named in Eudaly’s and Hardesty’s proposal.

The budget office didn’t analyze the possible impact Lovell’s scenario could have on the police bureau’s operations and service, but it said cuts to all the units the chief identified would save more than $18 million.

