Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has lifted a months-long pause o homeless camp removals along highways and interstates after state officials committed to pay an additional $600,000 through June, according to city officials and documents reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Portions of Interstate 405 that cut through the heart of downtown, Interstate 205 near the Lents neighborhood and Interstate 5 around Delta Park and Portland International Raceway — as well as adjacent sidewalks and multi-use paths — are among areas that will receive priority attention in the coming weeks, city officials said.
The additional funding came after Gov. Tina Kotek directed her staff and Oregon transportation officials to come up with more money that Portland officials said they needed to resume sweeps and camp cleanups of state-owned property within city limits.
An agreement formalizing the financial boost through June 30 was signed by city and state officials March 31, according to a copy obtained through a public records request.
Portland stopped its state-contracted work on those properties in late January after it burned through all the annual funds allotted to it by the Oregon Department of Transportation halfway through the fiscal year.
Tents and the piles of garbage and debris their inhabitants generate again started to conspicuously crop up near on-ramps and along rights-of-way since that work ceased.
All of the state arterials are among the so-called high crash corridors along which Wheeler banned camping last year through an emergency declaration that allowed the city to prioritize sweeps in those areas.
The $600,000 includes $200,000 from a state special programs fund and $400,000 from a regional reserve fund normally held for addressing unanticipated maintenance needs, said state transportation spokesperson Kevin Glenn.
That funding, however, falls short of a $1 million Wheeler requested from Kotek in late February to fund camp removals on state-owned property through the end of the fiscal year, documents obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive show.
Nor is it clear whether the governor and Oregon lawmakers will agree to allocate twice their normal amount of state funds for homeless camp removals in Portland for the coming two years, which Wheeler also requested. His office says the prepandemic rate of $2 million per two-year budget isn’t enough and they need $4 million to keep roadways adequately cleared.
The state transportation agency so far is crying poor. “The $2 million per year of ODOT maintenance funding is still the only funding identified at this time,” Glenn said.
The city of Portland first took over camp cleanup duties along interstate corridors from Oregon’s transportation department in 2019 amid a chorus of complaints from advocates for people experiencing homelessness about how the state agency performed such work.
Since then, encampments citywide have proliferated in size and number, creating a large and costly backlog that Portland officials began to aggressively clear last spring.
Documents show Portland will shell out $13 million this year on its homeless camp removal program, nearly a three-fold increase from the $5 million a year it spent prior to the pandemic.
Cody Bowman, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that 35% to 40% of all homeless camp removals in Portland now occur on state Department of Transportation property.
“Yet their resource commitment has remained the same, Bowman said. “As the problem has increased, we need ODOT’s commitment to be at-scale.”
— Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; skavanaugh@oregonian.com; @ShaneDKavanaugh
