Gov. Tina Kotek in the coming months will press to increase police presence downtown Portland, outlaw public drug consumption, take protective plywood off of buildings, and step up social services for those struggling on the streets of Oregon’s largest city.
As part of a push to rejuvenate a once-thriving downtown that has become a nationwide punching bag for its highly visible challenges, Kotek is also recommending offering tax relief to downtown businesses. She wants to pour millions into graffiti and trash cleanup on state-managed highways and hopes to declare a 90-day state of emergency to refocus officials at all levels of government on a festering fentanyl addiction crisis.
The recommendations are the most prominent takeaways to emerge from Kotek’s Portland Central City Task Force, a sprawling group made up of more than 40 businesspeople, politicians, and others with a stake in downtown Portland. The task force, announced in August, set an aggressive four-month timeline for finding ways to make quick progress on the city’s largest challenges.
“We have a set of concrete recommendations, some the first of their kind, others that tap into Portland’s strengths in innovation, collaboration, art, and culture,” Kotek said in a statement. “The reward for a strong start is more work. I am committed to this effort and excited to see this work unfold.”
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said he is pleased with the final recommendations because they reflect his administration’s priorities. ”The recommendations from the task force are in perfect alignment with the work that we’re already doing,” Wheeler told OPB Monday morning.
The governor’s office released a summary of the to-do list ahead of a presentation Kotek is scheduled to make Monday morning at the annual “leadership summit” of the Oregon Business Plan. Also scheduled to speak are those who chaired task force subcommittees on topics like public safety, homelessness, trash and taxes.
“When I look at this list from our Task Force committees, I see a set of refreshing, bold solutions that are smarter, stronger, and will be more effective than what any one person or governmental entity could achieve alone,” Dan McMillan, CEO of The Standard insurance company, said in a press release from Kotek’s office.
A rundown of the top recommendations to come out of the task force:
It’s unclear how much traction Kotek’s recommendations will ultimately have, along with who will be held responsible for putting the ideas into place. The roadmap struck some online observers as obvious steps to combat Portland’s woes, and others as overly reactionary. But the plan received largely positive reaction from the hundreds of businesspeople and politicos in attendance at the Moda Center when the governor presented her conclusions -- particularly the call to criminalize public drug use.
At the task force’s first meeting, Wheeler submitted his own list of recommendations for the group to consider. Many of those suggestions, like freezing new taxes and expanding trash cleanup, are included in Kotek’s final package. With a grim city budget forecast for the coming year, he’s hopeful that Kotek will commit state dollars to see some of her recommendations through.
“If this is truly the beginning of a partnership with the state, then we need to know what that partnership looks like beyond encouragement,” Wheeler said. “In other words, show me the money.”
Kotek caught some Portland elected officials off guard in August, when, after making no secret of her disappointment with their leadership, she announced her own task force to take on the city’s challenges.
The governor set a fairly grueling timeline — just four months to complete the work and only three in-person meetings of the body’s 46-person central committee. Kotek and McMillan also created five subcommittees that held their own meetings and roped in more participants.
All meetings were held out of public view, a step Kotek argued was necessary to allow for candid discussion.
“We want to see more foot traffic,” Kotektold reporters in a briefing after the first task force meeting in August. “We want to see fewer overdoses.”
While the initial recommendations to surface from the task force are in line with many of the subjects Kotek, McMillan and subcommittee members have spoken about publicly, not all topics made the short list.
For instance, a “central city value proposition” subcommittee looked into increasing housing downtown and creating more vibrant events, its chair, Nolan Lienhart, told OPB in November. Those suggestions weren’t mentioned in Kotek’s release, though they are likely to emerge. Lienhart was scheduled to present on Monday morning.
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