CUB Digs Into the Portland Budget Process

Portland’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. Work is already underway to develop 2015-2016 budgets for the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), the Portland Water Bureau (PWB) and other city agencies. The City Council kicked off this process with a fiscal overview session in early November. The Council will likely prioritize investments to preserve infrastructure.

Let’s take a look at how the City of Portland’s budget process works.

Each city bureau recruits a Budget Advisory Committee (BAC). The BACs began meeting in October and will finish their work at the beginning of the next year. Bureau-requested budgets are due to the City Budget Office in early February and then reviewed in Council work sessions.

The Mayor then releases a proposed budget in late April or early May. The Council holds a series of budget hearings and town halls that give Portlanders a chance to weigh in on various issues on different bureau budgets. The whole process wraps up in June with a City Council vote that adopts a final budget, ready to be implemented on July 1.

CUB is working to analyze the various proposals for spending at the BES and PWB to make sure that ratepayers will get good value from the money they pay in rates. We’ll be keeping CUB members updated on our progress. Last year for the first time, the City held a mid-March public hearing focused solely on utility budgets and it looks like that will happen again in Spring 2015. CUB will keep you posted on that hearing and possible budget concerns.

You may have heard that the Utility Oversight Blue Ribbon Commission recommended replacing the BES and PWB BACs with a Public Utility Board (PUB) that will meet year-round. The PUB will also have a broader scope including oversight of major construction projects, which are the major drivers of rate increases. Lastly, the PUB will also have its own dedicated staff. These recommendations address several shortfalls about the current BAC process for the utility bureaus:

• The BACs meet early in the budget process, but are not included in assessment of the Mayor’s budget and other later steps in the budget process.
• The short time period for BAC deliberation does not allow for input on major construction planning. That means the BACs are primarily providing input on much smaller chunks of utility bureau budgets like operations and maintenance.
• BACs do not have independent staff to evaluate and develop questions about budget information provided to them by the utility bureaus.

CUB will push the City Council to fully implement these and other Utility Oversight Commission recommendations. But timing is everything and most of the recommendations come into play in the next round of budgeting. That means the work of the current set of BACs is still important, as is CUB’s involvement in reviewing the budget process, especially after the BACs end their efforts.

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