Willamette Week64%
The City’s New Police Accountability Body Is Dragged Into a Budget Fight 32%
By Sophie Peel45%
7/22/2026, 2:03:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Pessimism Bias, and Recency Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 18.9% saturation with 319 hits. Analysis detected 1,656 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,686 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 41.6% and a BS Rank of 32% (13,445 of 19,731 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 68.10% of the article peer group.
In the election that followed 2020’s summer of tear gas, Portlanders saw an idea they loved.
They voted by a 4-to-1 ratio to set up a citizen board that would investigate and punish misconduct by police officers.
Six years later, that Office of Community-Based Police Accountability remains bogged down in politics.
It still hasn’t hired a director.
Its 21-member volunteer board is unlikely to hear a case for another year or so.
And that means the office is unlikely to spend much of the $16 million annual budget voters allotted.
Meanwhile, the 12 disgruntled members of the Portland City Council are seeking to reverse dozens of layoffs they ratified last month across city bureaus.
Some have eyed the money the police accountability board likely can’t spend as a means to undo some of the cuts they just approved.
Is that spitting in the face of one of the few clear mandates Portland voters have issued in the past decade?
The council’s progressive caucus, or Peacock, certainly thinks so.
Its members—who have their own proposal for reversing layoffs—argue that tapping the unformed office would further hamstring a project that’s been battered by years of delays and political tinkering by a city government that doesn’t truly want police accountability.
“They deserve an opportunity to make a budget.
They haven’t even been given that before you’re cutting them at the knees?”
Councilor Candace Avalos says.
“That is political, that is not a budget technicality.”
The centrists who proposed the budget maneuver argue their proposal is just about fiscal responsibility: They’d tap money where it’s not being spent.
If that’s OCPA, so be it.
“From my perspective, the only reason to reference OCPA to begin with is to say: ‘Hey, we’re relying on underspending.
This is where we think it will occur,’” says Councilor Steve Novick.
To some extent, the scuffle is a reflection of a larger fight that voters are likely to decide this November, when a ballot measure may ask them to divert Portland Clean Energy Fund dollars to increase police staffing.
Both debates revolve around large pools of money that voters earmarked via direct democracy, and that some elected officials, seeing a budget crunch elsewhere in the city, are eager to see any excess funneled elsewhere.
But the fate of the Office of Community-Based Police Accountability is noteworthy in its own right.
An agency with a $16 million budget and no executive director to spend it has been thrust into the middle of a bitter council fight that could result in the mayor casting a tiebreaking vote for the first time in his tenure.
The 82% of Portland voters who voted for Measure 26-217 had the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd and the show of force by Portland police against downtown protesters fresh in their minds.
The measure, backed by Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, promised to create a new police accountability board funded by an amount equal to 5% of the Portland Police Bureau’s annual budget.
The board would investigate allegations of police misconduct and set discipline.
An independent commission spent two years creating a blueprint for the new board.
When it presented its plan to the Portland City Council in 2023, the five-member council balked, saying it would be unfairly punitive to police officers.
The council watered down pieces of the plan, but largely kept the body’s powers intact.
But the hits kept coming.
The police union backed a ballot initiative in 2024 that would have gutted the board; it died early on.
Later that year, U.S.
District Judge Michael Simon ruled that only a new City Council could appoint the board members.
It finally did so in 2025.
In recent months, the 21-member board has met but not yet hired an executive director—a process that remains ongoing, board members say.
Without an executive director, board members told WW, there’s little in the way of hiring and planning that can be done with the new office’s $16 million budget.
Because that budget was set by voters at 5% of what the Police Bureau gets, the office runs against every budgeting principle that city budget director Ruth Levine has learned in her career.
Unlike a typical bureau that would add up all of its existing services and then ask for a budget based on the projected costs, the ballot measure reverse-engineered the process.
It’s charter-mandated to receive $16 million this year, with no clear plan for how—or if—it will spend most of that money.
(Board members have said they’re seeking a permanent facility to rent or buy and, as soon as the executive director is hired, will start to hire support staff and investigators.)
The simplicity of OCPA’s proposed budget this year betrays that reality.
Its budget contains just three line items: $5.8 million for external materials and services, $5.6 million for internal materials and services, and $5 million for personnel.
Last year, early estimates project that OCPA underspent its budget by $12.2 million.
“OCPA is a huge outlier” on underspending, Levine tells WW, “both in terms of number and percent.”
From the minute Mayor Keith Wilson presented his proposed budget in May, councilors have looked for ways to avert cuts to public safety bureaus.
Councilor Olivia Clark was the first to suggest tapping OCPA’s budget to prevent cuts.
Her proposal died by a 6–6 deadlock.
(The mayor may not break ties on budget amendments.)
Fast forward to June 18, when the City Council begrudgingly passed the 2026–27 budget, which made broad cuts to personnel, police, fire and parks and took effect July 1.
Almost immediately, though, councilors started to concoct ideas to reverse some of the cuts they had just ratified.
Two dueling proposals emerged.
The Peacock idea envisioned using a mixture of climate tax interest and contingency funds to craft a $12.7 million package that would preserve 48 jobs and reverse some cuts to police, parks and fire.
The centrists’ idea envisioned using $10 million from the general fund contingency and $2.25 million from “other funds” to preserve 30 jobs and restore some public safety cuts.
(One big difference: The centrist proposal also seeks to restore $3 million in police training.)
The centrists proposed using OCPA funds, among other underspent budgets, to replenish the general fund contingency.
The same debate over OCPA ensued and remains ongoing.
Peacocks argue the replenishment plan would place implied pressure on OCPA to underspend its budget “to fulfill the will of the council,” said Councilor Angelita Morillo during a recent council meeting.
In a July 14 newsletter to constituents, Councilor Sameer Kanal wrote that the centrist proposal “would sabotage and ultimately defund OCPA” and send a “significant portion of the money” to the Police Bureau.
Novick said Kanal was misleading the public.
“They know that’s wrong.
We said it until we were blue in the face,” Novick told WW in a phone call.
“I cannot dislike Sameer.
He’s one of my favorite people.
But that was bullshit.”
The centrists did hop on board with a tweak to their proposal by Council President Jamie Dunphy that removes the specific directive to look first at using OCPA funds, but it’s unlikely to change the outcome: When the list of underspending across bureaus comes to the council next spring, OCPA is likely to top the list.
Board members of OCPA that testified to the council in recent weeks and others WW interviewed expressed frustration at being caught in the middle of this scrum.
All who testified said they disliked the centrist proposal, but they took different positions on whether they felt it was targeting OCPA specifically or it was just a matter of mathematics, as Novick had said.
Former City Council candidate Terrence Hayes testified that the likelihood of OCPA spending all $16 million of its budget was “unrealistic,” but that “taking money from this office before it has even the chance to present a budget is problematic and dangerous.”
Board member Tim Pitts testified the ordinance is “blatant interference against [OCPA’s] independence” and that it’s “yet another attack on police accountability.”
Tisha Pratt, another OCPA board member, tells WW the ordinance “creates an immense amount of pressure because now the feeling is that we need to speed up what we’re doing.”
Without an executive director, board members have said, the board really can’t share more about its plans for hiring staff and what it realistically will spend this year.
The board held an emergency meeting on July 14 to discuss the latest ordinance.
“In my opinion, there’s only so much you can do without having a director,” board member Sara Citrenbaum said.
“The director is really our focus right now.”
The board has an executive session this week to review job applications; 140 have been submitted so far.
OCPA would not share further details about whether it has whittled down the candidate pool or just begun reviewing applications.
Meanwhile, Morillo garnered enough votes on the council last week to amend the Peacock ordinance in a way she thinks will make it more palatable to centrists, with the ultimate goal of eventually securing at least seven votes.
As a result, the Peacock ordinance is now bigger—$18 million in mostly climate tax interest to save 55 jobs instead of $13 million—and includes the centrist’s $3 million for police training.
She presented it as a compromise package.
At least one centrist councilor—Loretta Smith—appeared impressed.
“This is amazing and outstanding, what you’ve written,” she said.
“And I like it.”
The council votes on both proposals this week.
If either or both results in a tie, Mayor Keith Wilson will, for the first time since he and the council took office, use his tiebreaking powers to break the deadlock.
(Because these are ordinances rather than budget amendments, Wilson is empowered to cast a deciding vote.)
Mayoral spokesman Cody Bowman said in a statement that Wilson would not speculate on a tie before it happens.
“Both proposals are still under council deliberation, and Mayor Wilson will continue to follow this issue closely,” Bowman said.
“Beyond that, he will decline to speculate on any tiebreaking vote.”
Analysis
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