 Hi, I'm Lisa Savage. Welcome to Pathways to Progress. I'm here with counselor Victoria Pelletier and virtually counselor Roberto Rodriguez who sadly has come down with COVID, but here he is from his sick bed from his home, joining in to our show tonight. So thank you for making this extra effort to be here. Oh, God, I'm much appreciated. And thank you to our tech crew for making this happen. So, gosh, let's check in. How has it been since we met last? Since we met last, yeah, we had a really, really long meeting. I think the longest that the city's ever had. That's what we were hearing. We ended, we started the meeting at five and we ended probably around 1.45 in the morning. So I got- You guys could get in the Guinness Book of World Records. Well, that's what I was thinking. I think it's the longest one that we'd ever had and we had four hours of public comment, of course, on the order around to the encampment. So that's naturally why we were there so late. We didn't even start deliberation for that item until after midnight. It was probably around 12.15. I think that we started even talking about that item. So it was definitely a really heavy night for a lot of us and then just like going into deliberation after four hours of public comment was an experience. I think that in two years of being on the council, we've never gone remotely that late. I think the closest that we've gotten is maybe, I don't know, 11 maybe, but yeah, it was a really long night for us. And how did the public testimony break down where most people in favor of the resolution, the amendment or not in favor, even split? Yeah, I mean, I think it was somewhat split. Perhaps there was a larger number of people that were speaking against the order and that might have been based just in how effective fear is in activating people's emotions. A lot of the messaging against order 68 was religious fear mongering, telling people how bad the encampments are gonna get if this order passes and how people will prefer to stay outdoors over the winter if this order passes. And all these things that were really painting us to be the leaders of just reckless behavior and encouraging lawlessness and that I believe really struck at the heart of a lot of residents that came out and spoke against order 68. So at the end of the day, I always say, even if we'd had 670 people show up testify, we're hearing from 1% of our population. So we always ask ourselves, right? When we say that we have to bring an equity and a justice lens into this, we always wanna ask ourselves who is not in the room or we not hearing from what concerns and points are being left out of this conversation. And if you summarize what we heard from public comment, there was a lot that was left out. And a lot of it that has to do with the dignity of the unhealthful community that was left out. Okay. And Councillor Pelletier, you were complaining a little bit about this false dichotomy that seemed to emerge between it's either shelter or it's encampments. And your problem with that is that it's illogical. Yeah, I mean, I just, it was frustrating how the messaging, I think, very conveniently got co-opted into, if we can't get people inside, then what are we gonna do? We have to get everybody inside. It's cold out, it's wintertime. As if people aren't dying in all seasons, being unhoused obviously, regardless. In summertime, like I attend, I have the privilege of attending homeless voices for justice. They hold the longest day of homelessness on the summer solstice to talk about how it's never a safe time to be without shelter, whether it is summertime, whether it's wintertime. So the narrative around, we can't leave people outside was so harmful and frustrating because even if every shelter was full and it often is, people are still outside. We'll still have hundreds of people outside. So it's not like by passing order 68, we were saying, yeah, we're just gonna leave everybody outside and that's it. It was let's make sure that in the meantime of working to get people into shelter, which we are continuously actively doing. So I think people thought we weren't gonna try and get people into shelter. We're just saying let's not bulldoze their homes while we're trying to get people into shelter. We're saying let's let everybody at least stay where they are with, of course, some carve-outs of places that no camping is allowed until we can at least work towards getting everybody to move into the shelter. But by bulldozing the homes and saying, if you don't wanna take the shelter, then we're getting rid of your home, then we are criminalizing homelessness. And I don't know any other way to say it because we're essentially saying, if you don't take this shelter, which again has a significant amount of barriers, which is feedback that we've gotten directly from the unhoused community of the fact that you can't bring in a pet, you can't bring in a backpack, you can't stay with your significant other. These are significant problems that I would hope we would be working to alleviate so that people didn't feel like they were going to a jail cell or a warehouse. And I think it comes from a really privileged perspective from us with houses saying, well, I don't know why you wouldn't wanna go stay in a warehouse. I don't know anyone who would actually want to go stay into an area where you can't bring in your personal belongings or have any sense of autonomy. So it was frustrating that we're kind of saying like it's either the warehouse that you don't like or we're bulldozing your home and there's no in between. And I think Order 68, a lot of people maybe missed that. To me, that was an in-between method of saying, we're gonna look at the systemic issues. We're gonna work to get everybody into shelter. But the best and most effective way to do that is to not disperse everybody throughout the city again and again and again. Because as we know, every time an encampment's swept, it becomes an emphasis area. And then people are wondering why encampments are growing and growing. Why we have a Harborview encampment now that's growing is because no one has anywhere to go. And I think my biggest thing too was we've been sweeping since May for even the people that are pro-sweeping, it's not working. So even if you were pro-sweeping, you can't look at me and say that the sweeps are working because they're not. We continue to see encampments. We continue to see bigger encampments. We have a significant problem and it's so frustrating that the order failed six to three because I feel like people were just kind of looking at the top issue of saying, we don't want anybody outside. We wanna get everybody inside. Roberto, Anna and I very much wanna get people inside as well, but we also don't want to bulldoze the only belongings that they have in the process of doing so. And preserve their humanity as best as we can. So it's frustrating. Doesn't it make it harder for their case worker or someone who's working with them to find housing to literally find them again after the encampments are swept? Councilor Rodriguez, you were telling me something interesting before we started about how Councilor Travorro got a huge amount of pushback for referring to unhoused people as her constituents. Yeah, as I said before, like the dignity of unhoused people I believe was missing from our conversation. And Councilor Travorro had, she spoke very eloquently about the purpose of our order. And in it, she expressed that she considers all these folks to be her constituents, right? Because they're members of our community. They're our neighbors. And she received pushback from that. People saying, how dare you consider them your constituents? And it's kind of like tied in there. Like they're saying, why don't you compare them to me? Right? Like I'm a taxpayer. I'm a property owner. I contribute to this community and they're not equal to me. And that came across so, so loudly from folks that were pushing back against that comment. And it's really disheartening. It's disheartening because even, I went into that evening pretty sure that that order was gonna fail. But I felt it was important for us to put it out there for Councilors to vote and be on the record on this and to try to have a substantive discussion about this and our policies and the impact of our policies. And I was hoping that we could at least clarify some of those misconceptions about where on-house members of our community belong in our discussions and how we prioritize their needs. And unfortunately, we were robbed of that. And if anything, I feel like we set up the opportunity for people to express more of this hatred and this dehumanizing of on-house people. And it was sad. It was really sad to see. I agree with Councilor Pelletier with Tori that the criminalization of homelessness and the way that our policies have been creating problems since we started with the sweeps and the way that people that support the sweeps are just completely neglecting all the ill impact. Everything that we heard from people of their experiences and all the criminal activity, everything is happening under our current policies. And there was no acknowledgement of how our current policies are worsening these situations. Everything was old. If this order passes, it'll just get that much worse. One last thing that I want to acknowledge, since the order failed, there has been three, I believe, four deaths in on-house people in our community. And most of them have been people that have been isolated. People that have been pushed down into isolation and they've been found either because of a fire or some other horrible incident. And we need to acknowledge that that's happening because of our policies. That we created those people's lives, we lost them because of our policies. And no one should push back against that and no one should be able to just gloss over that. It's not because order 68 was proposed. It's because of the way that we're currently conducting business and the way that the city currently treats on-house members of our community. Yeah, it's been sad the rate of people dying has been pretty extreme lately on-house people. So we, Warren Edgar, our director, and I went out into the street and asked people for their thoughts, again, as we have been doing. The first clip actually is completely pertinent to what we're talking about. So maybe if Warren's ready, we could run that one and then we can talk about it. So do you have any reaction to the recent vote that failed the attempt to ban encampment sweeps for the winter? I think it's great to be able to ban that for the winter, like putting a time frame on it. But I still can't believe we voted in a mayor that is for sweeping camps. Like it just doesn't seem like- Criminalizing homelessness in general, with such an issue here, and that's just not the way. Criminalizing homelessness is not going to solve the issue. Probably going to worsen it. So this person was expressing why did we elect a mayor that's going to continue to criminalize homelessness? But that was a voter. There's certainly not on you guys. That was voters doing what they do. And I mean, it seems to me that the phrase criminalizing homelessness also encompasses more than just housing. It encompasses things like access to sanitary ways to dispose of your bodily waste, access to a place to take shower and wash your clothes. The sort of crime, from the outside looking in, it looks to me like Portland just goes, this encampment's pushed out, now you can never camp there again. Now that you're pushed out of there, now you can never camp there again. Aren't they sort of just creating a patchwork of, you can never camp there again. So eventually any tent, any camping becomes illegal. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, the policy itself is so wild to me in that way of the fact that we're designating emphasis areas. And then people are wondering again why we're having these large encampments that are appearing because we're running out of room. I mean, Harborview is only, I'm sure, a couple of weeks away from being swept. And then I have no idea where individuals will go. But I definitely agree that it's not just being without a home, but it is we're just stripping these individuals of their dignity, by the way that we speak about them, by the way that we treat them. I mean, we heard in public comments someone said that giving food to the unhoused community was enabling them. Like giving someone a- To enabling them to what? Enabling them. Yeah, and I mean, like giving someone a sandwich was an act of enabling the unhoused community. And it's very much like pick yourselves up by your bootstraps mentality as if we don't live in a society where there's a significant amount of classism and oppression and racism. And it's hard. I mean, it's hard to have to deal, I guess, with the fact that the order fails because that felt very much like our chance to really do something as counselors. And, you know, I think in terms of the new mayor, counselor, not counselor anymore, mayor, Dion, that was elected. I mean, at the end of the day, the mayor still gets one vote. And I think, you know, a lot of people definitely look at the mayor position as equivalent to the city manager and it's not. We're still subservient to the city manager. The mayor is still in theory and at-large counselor. They do get to stand at the top and definitely facilitate the conversation, but we all still have one vote at the end of the day. So I think it'll be interesting to see how we move forward with our goal setting workshop because I know that the conversation around our unhoused community and what we're going to do will come up and especially with the work of the Health and Human Services and Public Safety Committee that will start back up again in January. So I'm looking forward to having conversations of saying, well, okay, order 68 didn't pass, so what else can we do? What are the options? Because as we've seen, what we've continued to do is not working. So I look forward to the other counselors who did not support this measure also to come up with some other solutions if they think that, you know, order 68 maybe wasn't something that they wanted. Then I'm open to a discussion around what it is that we can do instead. Or you don't think those 50 extra beds are going to solve the... Oh man, the 50 bed conversation, well, I'll let counselor Rodriguez talk about that. It's 170 beds, by the way. True. And the large majority of them right now, I believe are sitting empty. So yet to be determined whether that really is going to be an effective strategy. You know, if I can just add something, I, you know, the mayor, you know, Mayor Dian during his campaign, you know, I think he struck a chord with people when he's the way that he spoke about this issue particularly. And as we heard him probably comment through order 68, this really got people activated. And whether we agree with what Mark said or not, you know, this is, I believe, a big reason why he was catapulted to win the election. You know, he struck a chord in the way that he spoke about homelessness and the way that he plans to approach it. I, you know, one of the biggest, I think, problems that I was trying to also highlight here is how ineffective the council is when it comes to administrative policies that the city manager can execute without our oversight. And I was trying to, we, I believe, you know, the Health and Human Services Committee, who by the way, after two years of asking to be part of that committee, I'm finally a member of the committee for my third year of this term. I'm finally going to be in the Health and Human Services. I didn't know that, that's exciting. Yeah, absolutely, we're in it for this year together. So I'm really excited that I've been trying to fight all these issues from Health and Human Services from like the, from outside. So I'm good to be part of this now. But yeah, so I, you know, I think that he struck a chord with both and it's what catapulted him to be elected. I guess what I was trying to say is, you know, administrative policies and the council not being able to have oversight over that was part of what we were trying to communicate through Order 68. That changing our ordinance on camping is the only way that we could stop the sweeps. There's no other way that the council can stop the sweeps because the manager is the one that has that authority. And you know, if my fellow councillors who agree that the sweeps are not an effective and they're an inhumane way to treat homelessness and yet they didn't support Order 68, they failed to acknowledge that it's the only vehicle that we have accessible to us to stop the sweeps or they just didn't step up to the plate that night. But couldn't you pass an emergency ordinance that would trigger emergency pay for every worker in the city to solve the, sorry, too soon? Well, let me, let me, let me add to why you're saying this. You're right. And I share this with you. And I don't know that I've spoken very much about this in public, but before Order 68, I was tempting to bring forward a moratorium on the sweeps by way of an emergency order, very similar to the way that the emergency order that added 50 beds to the shelter. And I have worked for a week with the city manager, with corporation council, with other councillors, and I had it all lined up to get onto the agenda. And the night before it got published onto the agenda, I get notified that if this order passes by the way that is written, that this would enact or kick in, has to pay throughout the city. And, and that was obviously shocked to hear this because they hadn't been mentioned for the entire week that I have been working to bring up this proposal. And at the very last minute, this gets dropped on my lap. And I'm like, I'm not going to bring this up if it's going to kick has to pay because number one is going to fail. It's going to look like I haven't been to school to people that have been explaining what I'm doing or it's going to make me look like I don't know what I'm doing. So I ended up having to pull it from the agenda. And the whole reason why I was trying to put that at that time on the agenda is because we were trying to get ahead of the margin away enhancement sweep. And we talked about it in this show, we anticipated what's going to happen when margin away gets swept. I asked councilor, councilor Beloteer, what do you think is going to happen? Everyone's going to go to Harborview. Sure enough, it's played out exactly as I said. And the fact that my attempt to have a moratorium on sweeps got, in all essence, got killed by staff, brought us on to have to deal with order 68, which in a very similar way got also killed by staff. The staff memo, I'm really heated up about this again. So the staff memo that included all of the departments and all the different concerns that they had. You know what department was missing from that memo? Yeah. Equity office. Yeah. You know what we did a year ago on the council? We stated that our goal is that all of the decisions are going to be viewed at through an equity lens. Todd, how odd is it that a staff memo does not include the equity director's perspective on what order 68 is aiming to accomplish? Did they forget to ask the equity officer or the equity office? I guess it is not part of our normal proceeding. Yeah, they had, we had a memo from every director except the racial equity director. The new racial equity director that we specifically hired to align with our goals and we budgeted for was not asked or didn't get to submit feedback. So that's why it's like, wow, you know, we made racial equity our goal and conveniently have sidestepped it significantly with this. I mean, we received a lot of data from the ACLU on the racial impacts that sweeping encampments has. The data and the information is right in front of us and we're still like, no, let's not do it. So that's why even for our goal setting workshop on Monday, I'm like, I don't even know why are we doing racial equity? Let's not even do it if we're not actually gonna align ourselves with it because if we're not gonna do it seriously, we have a director, a racial equity director, we have the city's first ever department of DEI and he's not included in that conversation. He's not included, he doesn't get to write a memo. We don't have that information. So from the beginning in terms of the movement of order 68 and a lot of the things and the conversations that were happening, I think it was challenging. And I think the last thing I'll say about it too is that we received feedback as well that why would you put it on the agenda so late? Like before the new counselors joined as if that was the plan somehow and it was like underhanded when really you wanted to get that on the agenda for like the October meeting. And because of the staff pushback, you weren't able to. So it's, you know, I think it goes to show that it can be extremely difficult to put things on the agenda if they are historically something that we've never done before as a city and pushes back against some of the structures that we have. Well, aren't the, isn't the city of Portland lucky to have you and Councilor Rodriguez there to remind the city that, hey, we have a new, you know, we have goals and we set goals. We allocate budget resources to goals. Why would you allocate budget resources yet not use the, anyway. Yeah. We have another clip that is a little bit more about comprehensive services maybe that unhoused people might need. The thing that I remember that stuck with me from Mayor Dion's first debate was that he looked straight at the camera and he was addressing Janet Mills and he said, governor, you know, you need to step in here and do your job. So I felt that this gentleman that we're gonna hear for a minute, some of his issues probably are addressed or could be addressed at the state level. Okay. More equal spending and funding for people that are struggling with homelessness would be one needs to be a stupider range of services available for those that are being suppled through the system. Maybe more advocation for the homeless in terms of mental illness or a place to be held more accountable. Yeah. No, I think I agree, Lisa, that what you were alluding to that a lot of what we need is support from our state partners, right? From the governor's office, from the legislature and not to say that we've not had support from them but what we need right now is some just acute emergency crisis management support. And I do feel a little bit of optimism in what Mayor Dion can potentially accomplish is giving the experience and the relationships that he has in Augusta. And that it's pretty fair to characterize him as someone that has been in this field for so many years that he's built so many relationships hopefully that does pay up or that does kind of come out as helping us support the needs of folks through state resources. It's an interesting perspective. Councillor Pelletier, do you have anything to say about mental health services for, well for any, I mean to me when I hear mental health services I think well everyone needs mental health care and many people that are unhoused also need mental health care and find it hard to stay in housing because of living with certain mental illnesses but is that something that the city of Portland could possibly fund and provide without significant subsidies from either the state or the federal? Yeah, I think we would, I think the significance of like extended and significant funding would probably be hard for the city of Portland to do on its own. And I also think it comes down to the priorities that we have as we saw like we had racial equity as a priority, I don't know how many times we've actually done anything in terms of really aligning with those goals. I will say that that's something that we can definitely talk about in health and human services and public safety when we set our goals about like what are we able to do? What do we have the power to do around mental health? I know last year we talked about safe injection sites which I think would be significantly helpful here in Portland as we see with the encampments and people, a lot of the emails and the feedback we get or that people are seeing needles everywhere and that individuals are using in front of them if we had a designated site where people could actually use in a safe manner. I think that that would be really helpful and hopefully alleviating some of that. So I think around providing resources to our unhoused community in a wide array of options, I'm hoping that in the committee when we do set our goals we can see what our options are. I know we'll also have a new health and human services and public safety director as well. So that will be an interesting conversation around getting to know this new hire, this new individual and making sure that we can really align the goals that we have in that committee with the overall goals of the council. And I mean, we're gonna have to do everything that we can possibly do in order to work together to provide for our unhoused communities. The encampments aren't going anywhere regardless of the 161 Riverside street shelter that we opened regardless of the additional 50 beds. The encampments are not going to go anywhere. And so I think now it's what are we able to do as counselors as a community to make sure that we are recognizing these individuals as part of our community and providing the resources that they so desperately need. And it's gonna take all of us to support that. I think people wanna snap their fingers and the encampments are gone. That's not realistic, that's not gonna happen. And as we continue to grow and diversify as a city we're gonna have to get used to things that happen in cities. And I think that there will never be, we will never be free of encampments. That is the perfect segue to our final clip which is about things that happen in cities but it's not for once about actually unhoused people. I think that people will enjoy hearing this person, this Portlanders perspective. Yeah, I'm concerned about the decline of housing for year round residents and sort of the lack of low income housing, particularly as like a working artist in Portland that's pretty important to me and might force me out. So it's always on the back of my mind. So this person kind of personified that argument of like, you know it's the creative people that make Portland such an attractive tourist location for people to come for the art, for the performance art, for the food. If you drive those people out and they can't afford to live here what are you gonna have left? That this artist articulated it really well? Yeah, and I think we're seeing- Yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say and add that as we've often had, a lot of our hospitality workers are under the same circumstances. There are some of the lowest earning people and they make up a huge percentage of our workforce here in Portland and most of them cannot even afford to live in the same town that they work in. And I've said they can't even afford to work for the hours that they're working because the parking meters are so expensive. Oh, I thought I got cut off. I was like, yeah, exactly. I was just gonna say that this is a, yeah, this is a national problem. It's not unique to Portland. And I completely agree. The reason Portland is so great is because of the individuals that are the working class, hospitality individuals, the service industry workers, the backbone of Portland. And I think that happens often where it's a really beautiful quaint working class city that then as time goes on, starts to get overdeveloped and starts to cater towards individuals that are wealthier, individuals that are tourists. We just passed a tourism industry district on a vote that some of us weren't advocating for. But it was, I think for housing, I'm hoping that in committee again, we can look at the Arabian bees. We can look at little things that we're able to do to actually alleviate some of the unaffordability of Portland, but it's gonna, it has been and will continue to be a significant problem because we have limited housing stock and a significant amount of demand. So it's really just chipping away at an issue that has become bigger than us and is a thing that we're seeing at the national level. And those artists making the city look so attractive. I know. It's so cool and, you know. Yeah. I know. It happens in every city. Every city. Every city, yep. Can I follow up real quick with what Marie just said? I agree. I think that we have some really, we have some great opportunities of work that we can do in the committees. I think the short-term rentals is something that we have to pick up and figure out what we can alter there to help our housing stock and our rental housing stock. I think that we need to get goals that have objective measurable outcome. You know, when we create goals in, but perhaps not on Monday's goal setting for the council, but in our committee goal setting, you know, we should have a goal. I was talking to nearly elected councilor sites about this. We should have a goal of the number of units that we want to have accomplished, or at least in the pipeline by ex-date. And the last thing I want to say is about our goal setting exercise on Monday. You know, over the last two years, I think we've set these very high overarching goals. I want to see this big goal that... We're out of time, literally. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for zooming in. And thank you, audience. Thank you, the tech crew here at Portland Media Center couldn't do it without you.