OPINION | The mayor proposes underfunding the non-police crisis response program by 77%
Mayor Ted Wheeler’s budget allotment for Portland Street Response falls short. And this is not the time to short-change a non-police response Portlanders have demanded.
For this column, I write the name of Robert Delgado for the third straight week, as an insistence: Our city must design a system that refuses to accept his death and the deaths of so many before him who police have killed in moments of crisis.
Portland Street Response is a pilot now, and the combination of its limited hours and restrictions on calls routed to it meant the team was not dispatched to meet Robert Delgado. The police were, and they shot and killed Delgado from a distance. They did not engage in the deescalation that Portland Street Response is adept at.
A second pilot is scheduled to begin in Lents in August at the six-month mark of the first. This covers more hours. This is also the timing for the first evaluation stage to be completed, along with a report to City Council.
And that’s all Wheeler’s budget allows with funds of $978,000 for positions that are described as “temporary.”
That’s limited-scope ambition when the whole nation is watching: Portland was in the vanguard with this program, but with this budget, Wheeler seems set on reversing that course.
On the other hand, Portland Fire & Rescue has asked for $4.2 million to fund the Portland Street Response program. This amount is in-line with the cost Street Roots initially estimated would be needed to fund the program when we introduced the blueprint outlining our vision for Portland Street Response two years ago, and it’s in line with the $4.8 million City Council initially allocated toward the program last year when it famously defunded portions of the Police Bureau budget.
Portland Fire & Rescue has asked for this amount because it aims to expand the pilot citywide during this budget year, with three vans of teams operating 24 hours a day, every day. Then, that would be scaled out to six vans of teams by the next year, again operating citywide, 24 hours a day, every day.
But Wheeler has proposed allocating just 23% of what’s needed to fund the program.
I will explain why Wheeler’s rationale — as outlined in his proposed budget — does not make sense:
1. The city should wait until the program is evaluated before funding it.
I disagree; in fact it does not make sense to wait until evaluations are completed to fund the program. The Mayor’s proposal of limited funding is based on a wait-and-see approach to the evaluations. But this is a misunderstanding of how the evaluations have been designed.
“The purpose of the evaluation is to engage in deep study to determine how best to adjust, calibrate, and scale up PSR,” said Greg Townley, Director of Research for the Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, which is leading the evaluation. “No cities have engaged in as comprehensive and community-focused evaluation as we have, and this will ensure that PSR is successful as it scales up next year.”
As it scales up next year.
Our own Street Root ambassadors are working with PSU on the evaluation to doing the survey work with people who live in Lents, and have been going out for months building the trust necessary to ask follow-up questions. That’s how some of our folks, in fact, came to know Robert Delgado. But to use the evaluation as a reason to go slower is an affront to the lives that are on the line.
The evaluation is running simultaneous to the pilot (in other words, now) so information can be gathered as we go. Council is due to get an evaluation report in August. If need be, evaluation reports can come in more rapidly after that. Bottom line: these evaluations are designed so that Portland Street Response can be successfully scaled up at a year.
DIRECTOR’S DESK: With Portland Street Response, city is piloting for success and fewer obstacles
2. After a 12-month work session, City Council will be better informed to decide whether and how to expand the pilot.
There is wide-support to run Portland Street Response, so this language about "whether" to expand the pilot is curious – and alarming. If this is actually about whether Portland Street Response should be run through Portland Fire & Rescue or scrapped and outsourced, I'll state clearly that the program should be run through Portland Fire & Rescue. When I’ve argued that Portland Street Response should remain open to grassroots partnerships, this is to make space for added cultural responsiveness and nimbleness, but this should be done within Portland Fire and Rescue. Here's why:
Portland Fire and Rescue already has medical training, infrastructure to go city-wide, and knowledge of the dispatch system. Significantly, the White Bird Clinic, which runs CAHOOTS, the crisis response program in Eugene that Portland Street Response was based on, pointed out in a report on Portland Street Response that fire staff have the training and infrastructure to interact with the 911 dispatch codes and system. To attempt to have an outside organization run Portland Street Response, the report explains, would mean retraining all the dispatchers – a Herculean task considering that these dispatchers train for about 18 months. That’s rebuilding another system.
But there’s another reason why it’s important to keep Portland Street Response within Portland Fire & Rescue. Public sector jobs are good jobs. Leaders from some human service nonprofits programs are now speaking out about the disparities between wages paid to nonprofit employees under government contracts, and the public sector jobs themselves. Wages too often aren’t enough for people to secure quality housing.
If the city seeks to create the first new first-responder system in more than a century, it should not do that on the cheap, outsourcing jobs. This is certainly not how police labor is treated. And it shouldn’t be how Portland Street Response is treated.
Leading with scarcity means designing deprivation for the people who are struggling the most. If anything, the mayor should take page out of President Joe Biden’s book. We are in a time of transformation, when an expanded government can strengthen the social safety net.
The city has access to federal funds through the American Rescue Plan. And there will be new opportunities to fight for funding going forward. Oregon House Bill 2417 – sponsored by Reps. Tawna Sanchez (D-Portland), Pam Marsh (D-Southern Jackson County) and Janeen Sollman (D-Hillsboro) – would provide half the cost of mobile crisis teams statewide. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has sponsored the CAHOOTS Act to provide Medicaid funding for such programs nationwide.
This is not a time for the mayor and City Council to hold back. Half-efforts write the script of failure.
This is a time to be visionary.
Visit portlandstreetresponse.org to join us in asking Wheeler to dedicate the funding to Portland Street Response that it deserves.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2021 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 404.
"street" - Google News
May 04, 2021 at 10:45PM
https://ift.tt/3uiAJnL
Kaia Sand | Go big, Mayor Wheeler. Our city needs Portland Street Response. - Street Roots News
"street" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Ql4mmJ
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment