Eric Zimmerman, incumbent, spent 17 years as an army officer with assignments in Iraq, Kosovo, and Bangladesh and served as a major in the Oregon National Guard. Before winning election to city council he was chief of staff to Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards. On the council, he helped set aside future funds for sidewalk improvements in westside and outer eastside neighborhoods that lack sidewalks. He’s also sponsoring an ordinance to ban “surveillance pricing” or rapid price changes in grocery. If re-elected he wants to explore using the Portland Clean Energy Fund to support parks and urban forestry.
The Labor Press spoke with him via Zoom Oct. 12.
Labor organization endorsers: NOLC, CPBCTC, AFSCME, AFSCME 189 (1 of 4), IAFF 43, IBEW 48, IBT JC 37, IUOE 701, IW 29, LIUNA 737, PPA, SEIU, SMART UA 290, UBC, UFCW 555
More: ez4pdx.com
DON McINTOSH, NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS: In the last two years, you guys have had to deal with difficult budgets. What’s going on with the city’s budget, and what would you like to see change?
ERIC ZIMMERMAN: We’ve got two storms that have that collided at the same time. We have the change in the form of government, which means that we have some stuff that falls in the core realignment categories. In the old form we had a lot of bureaus who had created independent capabilities, things like their HR, their procurement, IT systems. And in any normal organization, you generally have that centralized, because we all work in the same kind of pyramid structure, for the same boss. So that’s one thing that’s going on. It happens to be happening at the same time when our revenue from property taxes is just plummeting, and the reason that it’s plummeting is because of property tax values. In Oregon’s system it takes a while for them to catch up. For instance, in the recession of 2008, homeowners lost their shirts in 2008, 2009, a little bit in 2010. Government started feeling that hit in 2012 and 2013 because our property tax system has to catch up. Well, that kind of thing is happening, and we see it right when Big Pink (U.S. Bancorp Tower) sells for $47 million instead of $350 million. That has real consequences. The restructuring of the city, hopefully it’s got an end date coming up because eventually you do get to — people use the term rightsizing … I don’t have a better term; it’s not a great term, but it’s eliminating duplication.
But eventually, that’s going to hit an end as long as the mayor stays on it. That one’s been tough for our workers, internally. You know, I’ve worked in four governments. None like this, where you had it duplicated over and over. Specialty is one thing. Duplication is a whole ‘nother thing. So it’s been tough for our folks, but that will come to an end.
The economic side of it, while we love to think that it’s a cycle, it’s going to take a while. We really didn’t see the housing market after the recession return until 2016-17. So we’re talking eight years the last time. Now I hope to God that’s not the case for our commercial real estate market, but it’s also now hitting our residential again. I know a lot of home prices are falling, but they haven’t hit the property tax cycle yet. But on the commercial side, they have hit the property tax cycle. So those are the two storms that are hitting at the same time when it comes to budget cuts. Two years of it, maybe a third year of it, that’s what we see. And then the other half of our general fund is business license taxes. Business license taxes in 1987 represented about 10% of the city’s general fund. They represent about 50% now.
It’s hugely different because Measure 5 and Measure 50 really restricted structurally in Oregon all our government to 3% or less in new revenue without growing. (The ballot measures, passed in the 1990s, say that property taxes can’t increase more than 3% a year even when market value increases more than that.)
So we’re not growing, and the things we do have are less valuable. So we collect less, and business license taxes have become a bigger portion of it. Those are directly related to if people are not making money in their businesses. So it’s volatile. Property taxes not volatile; they’re very predictable actually. Our Business License Tax is very volatile.
My first job, by the way, was Multnomah County’s tax department, so you’re getting me to nerd out.
If we had not done anything two years ago, or last year, or even the next year, we’d be talking about much bigger cuts. We would quite literally have not have made payroll when you’re talking $100 million each year cut for a couple of years. That’s the level we were talking about.
Was there a particular budget solution that you were part of? What were the different approaches? Is there an easy way to describe that?
I’m not sure there’s an easy way to describe it. For instance, Councilor Clark led on … we have a pot of money that by charter now has to go into the police oversight commission that was created. In this first year, it’s getting I think $13 million, and there’s nobody on the face of the earth that expects they’re going to execute $13 million since they didn’t even have staff when the budget was being created. But by charter, it has to exist. So she had led the charge on using a portion of that —which we knew was just going to be returned to the general fund a year from now — as a stopgap measure for some of the public safety funding.
That caught a lot of hell because there are others who look at that as a threat to it. With the way she structured that, I think it was very clear that it was not that (a threat to longterm funding of police oversight). It did nothing in the out years; it’s just in this one year when you’re not going to use it.
One of the areas that I’ve tried is where that’s applicable, using PCEF as an offset to general funds. Parks manages a lot of natural areas. Think about the largest carbon sequestration asset we have — Forest Park. Taking care of Forest Park and using some PCEF dollars to do it instead of Park’s general fund makes a lot of sense in my mind.
Then the mayor has consolidated and brought in the different IT functions, HR functions, and procurement functions. I largely supported where he went in that, but boy, that caught a lot of hell from fellow councilors.
Why is that?
I think there’s the sense that it didn’t include the employees’ perspective enough. I heard that. You’ve got to make those kind of decisions with employees’ perspective up front. We’ve got frontline employees who know their job’s ins and outs, and they do it well, and then we’ve got directors and senior directors and deputy directors who understand the direction and what we’re doing with the city. But we also saw emerge in the last budget cycle a significant amount of what I’ll call the middle management. The majority of management fall in that category of what I call middle management, who clearly did not have a grasp or ownership of their employees’ jobs, roles, and responsibilities. Folks came and couldn’t even describe what it was that they had proposed to cut. Once you do that, you really insert a level of almost like non-credible reductions. That was, I think, a big lesson that many in the administration learned. You can you can talk about what you’re going to reduce, you can direct what’s going to be reduced, but if you can’t describe how you’re going to overcome that reduction or patchwork it .… Sometimes we just have to say this was a thing we used to do. We’re no longer in that line of business, and that’s why we’re eliminating this service. And I would expect that anybody who’s got the management behind their name to have the chutzpah and the ability to say that. We didn’t really see that.
I think people agree that going from 26 versions of government to one version is going to have some change have to happen, but then when some people couldn’t articulate the cuts that they were proposing themselves, that kind of clipped the wings for a few of the ideas. I think it gave a lot of pause to many councilors.
We had this year something completely out of the blue come up. A billionaire bought a team and all of a sudden state and local government is asked to contribute to a stadium renovation. Our readers are going to be on both sides of this, some for it, some against it. Why was your “yes” vote on the Moda Center term sheet the right vote? (The term sheet refers to the council-amended opening proposal in negotiations with the new owners of the Portland Trailblazers)
I mean, $600 million of economic activity every single year that is related to the Blazers and the Moda Center being open and capable —it’s no small thing for all the surrounding businesses. But actually, I heard from businesses that aren’t surrounding the arena, that are quite a ways away, and they’re like, “No, this does matter because it’s part of our economic fabric.” The other part is there’s no other opportunity that I’ve seen or that we’re going to get where we’ll get more than a three-to-one help from two other governments to retrofit and improve and remodel our own asset. It just doesn’t exist. (The State of Oregon and Multnomah County had earlier voted funds for the renovation.) We don’t generally pay for another government’s asset. And since we own the Moda Center, putting in $120 million and getting a total of nearly $600 million out of it — that is significant for me in terms of my calculation. And doing it without raising taxes on a single Portlander or a single Oregonian — that was a big deal because on the state side, they’re using (a tax on) the salaries from the players.
I hear constantly that people are worried that the pipeline for work is becoming a trickle, and when that trickle dries up, our workers go other places. I’m talking about trades. I’m talking about skilled workers. I’m talking about construction.
This has the potential to keep a significant amount of our building trades engaged and with a community benefits agreement and making sure that when we spend $600 million collectively in the Portland region, that it actually stays with Portland workers who can eventually go to the game, and eventually pay taxes and eventually contribute to everything else. So, for the short term, it’s far more than $600 million in economic activity. That’s why I am supportive. I continue to be supportive, and if we can keep the Blazers for 20 more years, get the state and others to help us renovate, put workers to work for the next four years and potentially unionize the Moda Center as well, I think this is worthwhile.
I know Tom Dundon (the Blazers’ billionaire lead investor) wants to leave.
Does he? He’s not acting like a guy who wants to make any friends or stick around. You don’t think it’s a big con, like he’s playing Mister Difficult to scare you into giving up more?
I actually don’t. I think he does want to leave. I think our goal is actually … the NBA has a say on that. They can either make it cheap for him to leave, or they can make it really expensive. And I’ll just tell you what I told the Blazers president: “I’m gonna work like hell to make sure that we keep you guys here. But if you choose to leave, I’m gonna make it as fucking expensive as possible for you to leave.”
Portland had to put a good foot forward so that the NBA understood we were putting a good foot forward. If Dundon still wants to go, then I want to bleed him dry if he’s going to pull the team out of here.
I’m sure a lot of people would agree with that. You know, there’s 12 of you (on city council), and we’re looking back over two years. What are some things that you feel like are your own personal accomplishments, like an ordinance that you sponsored or shepherded to passage?
Last September, when the president said he was going to federalize the National Guard, and ICE was really active, this was a pretty rough time for everybody in Portland. During that time we learned that there was a lot of stuff like how do we interact as employees of the city of Portland? If I’m a Parks employee and ICE comes to a community center and says I want a list of everybody who signed in today, as a sanctuary city, how do we resist against that? One thing I learned, and I thought this was incredibly important, was any criminal charge that a city employee picks up in the course of doing their job would have to have been defended on their own dime in criminal court. So that scared me, and it also worried employees. So I passed new legislation that says if in the course of your job working for the City of Portland, you pick up some trumped-up fake bullshit charge and it’s related to something that would have put you in violation with our sanctuary city, the City of Portland will now defend you in court or pay for your legal defense in court. Until this year, that was not the case. We’ve never had to think that way before, but we were getting threats that by doing the job, the federal government would say you’re obstructing justice. If people would have had to defend themselves just for being an employee of the City of Portland, I thought that we had to fix that.
Okay, so just to back up and clarify, there was a threat by the Trump administration to prosecute city employees for not cooperating with ICE?
All sorts of things. For instance, we were told if anybody submitted something like a grant application and you included anything that they thought violated their perspective on DEI, that the person who signed that document, or our city administrator, or our mayor, could have been held in liable. They listed off a bunch of stuff. So that gave us a lot of pause.
The city of Portland made it very clear what were public and what were not public spaces. There was confusion about like, “well, I work for a sanctuary city. I’m not allowed to give you that information.” “Well, if you’re not going to give me that information, I’m going to detain you.” So we determined that if you were doing your job, we would be there for you.
Did any of that actually happen?
It didn’t. But that was an important one because it was like, “Let’s put everybody at rest for a second.”
I don’t know that anybody on the council has gotten more funding into the pipeline for more housing units than I have. So when I asked the housing bureau about a certain program, that unlocked … first it was $20 million, then it was $40 million, then it was over $50 million, then it was up to $100 million that they had in accounts that they had not accounted for, and we got that into a variety of different buckets. Some was going to emergency and long-term rent assistance. Others were going to developing units. Some were going to the development of ownership-based models for units in some targeted communities who’ve been displaced previously. So, getting housing units, getting housing dollars out the door has been a big focus for my first two years.
The mayor and I drove through my committee when I was the finance chair the system development charge waiver, for the first 5,000 units that took advantage of that. Councilor (Angelita) Morillo and I, we passed the design review reform resolution that is still in the pipeline, bringing forward some design review changes that we intend will help housing development. So I’ve just been focused on anything that can send the signal that Portland is open for production, open for development, and we want housing development.
In District 4 and District 1, we also have a pretty diminished sidewalk network given the way that those areas were developed. So I was part of the group that came up with the sidewalk improvement plan, which is designed for District 4 and District 1 to start increasing the number of sidewalks. PBOT has agreed to lower the standard of sidewalks that they can put in, which sounds weird, but if you think about downtown, those are like Class A sidewalks. Not every neighborhood in Southwest Hills needs that. They just need a little bit better than mud and gravel, so they’re more flexible now. Then when Councilor Clark passed the transportation utility fee, I voted against that, but in the amendment process, I did carve out that 12.5% of that fee will be dedicated to this sidewalk improvement plan. So we’ve actually got a line of funding directly related to sidewalk infrastructure being developed.
Is that the same as safety improvements, the Vision Zero thing?
Vision Zero got the other 12.5%.
Originally that ordinance was 75% would go to transportation, paving, et cetera, and they left a quarter of it and they had some pretty broad terms. I said no way, not doing that. We’re going to get specific, so we cut out 12.5% for us and 12.5% for Vision Zero.
Very complimentary, but we wanted them to be distinct because we didn’t want to be five years down the path and say, well, it fell into this bucket — and have them miss the mark.
But you voted against the plan. This is the one that’s gonna be on our water bills here pretty soon. Is that right?
Yep.
And why did you vote against it?
I don’t think it’s the right time to be raising taxes.
But apparently you were in the minority?
Oh yeah. I’ve been in the minority on all these tax increases.
I think I have the “no vote” record right now on these tax increases.
That’s why you’re so popular then.
We’ll see. I got a couple weeks to know how popular.
No, I mean among your council members. Are there any other personal accomplishments that you want to make sure that we know about?
People have been hearing more and more about the daily sidewalk cleaning programs. That program has been adopted by the city, the administration, but it started with Councilor Clark and I. We used some of our budget. Central City Concern has a program called Clean Start, which is folks who are just coming out of homelessness and addiction and are ready for their first job, and they are the ones you see pushing carts with the bright orange or bright green vests on. We did that along the 405 corridor in Southwest and Northwest Portland because we had a lot of trouble under those areas, and it reverberated into the neighborhoods. And so that program was so successful, the mayor adopted it. And then we just saw this last week they are expanding even to East Portland now.
We have these things in the city called “enhanced service districts.” But the reliance on that word means that there’s a basic “service” expectation, and we put that in the category of “We’ve got to meet the basics of services if we’re going to have enhanced. So we’re trying to get back to basics on that.
You said you and Clark used some of your budget. You mean your office budget that was given to you to hire staff and run an office?
Yep, in that very first year, we got budgets, but we were still growing our team, so we both had some excess, and we each put $100,000 into that program to get it piloted. It was successful, and then they kept it going.
Anything else we haven’t discussed?
The administration extended the parking hours in my district, so we said no thank you from 10 p.m. back to 7 p.m. So we won on that.
The other thing … a lot of the parks levy budget was being used on stuff I wouldn’t say was really appropriate for the levy, so we got it more focused on recreation and maintenance. I kind of led the charge on that instead of code enforcement. We thought Portlanders would want their levy dollars spent on things their kids actually go use.
