Citing ethical issues and potential conflicts of interest, advocates want the city to halt a no-bid contract renewal that would funnel millions to the Portland Metro Chamber. by Courtney Vaughn For years, Portland has collected fees from property owners in enhanced service districts to pay for added cleaning and security services in designated areas. The districts are typically concentrated around businesses, offering private security, extra policing, janitorial services, and more recently, removal of homeless camps.  Some stakeholders say the city has yet to confront the unique and outsized role of Portland’s most powerful business lobbying group at one enhanced service district (ESD) in particular—Downtown Portland Clean & Safe. This week, Portland City Council is scheduled to vote on a 116-acre expansion of the Downtown Portland Clean & Safe district, as well as a fee hike and a five-year management contract renewal for the district.  Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, more than 100 Portlanders and over a dozen community groups are urging City Council to postpone the contract renewal that would funnel a hefty portion of a $58 million, no-bid contract to the Portland Metro Chamber. An open letter to city commissioners outlines a number of transparency and ethics issues surrounding the Clean & Safe contract, asking the Council vote to be tabled until a new Council is sworn in this January. Currently, the Downtown Portland Clean & Safe district is overseen by an organization of the same name, whose management has significant overlap with the executive leadership of the Portland Metro Chamber (formerly the Portland Business Alliance). A large chunk of funding for the Metro Chamber’s leadership staff comes from a lucrative contract to oversee the Downtown Portland Clean & Safe ESD. That means a private group that lobbies the city on behalf of private business interests is being paid millions in public money to oversee a service district that includes a large swath of its own dues-paying members. The downtown district also includes several government agencies and properties that pay into the ESD—including Portland City Hall. Moreover, community groups say the contract and service delivery model are convoluted at best, with next to no oversight from the city. The letter’s signatories say the petition for district expansion, and the accompanying contract renewal “raises serious concerns related to affordability, efficient use of public resources, accountability, and transparency.” “The City contracts with Clean & Safe, which subcontracts with other organizations to carry out cleaning and safety services. Yet the executive director of Clean & Safe is simultaneously an employee of the Portland Business Alliance, which is also a subcontractor of Clean & Safe,” the open letter to Council states. “Unclear lines of oversight make it difficult for ratepayers or the public to hold anyone accountable. Even more concerning, the contract allocates significant overhead to the Portland Business Alliance, the city’s most active lobbying organization.” It's a contract that mystifies everyone from accountants, to ratepayers, and even auditors.  A 2020 city audit of Portland's ESDs found "little oversight" of the privately funded public service districts and noted "complicated governance and management systems" that obfuscate public access to basic information such as budgets and subcontracts. Not long after the city audit, a local business executive spoke out about the questionable business arrangement baked into the Clean & Safe contract. When she did, she was allegedly threatened with a lawsuit from the Portland Business Alliance. Since then, other local government watchdogs have taken note, but gotten little traction with city leadership. “I think this council has an ethical responsibility to answer all these questions for the voters, or wait,” Diane Goodwin, a member of local political advocacy group Portland For All, says. Cleaning services praised; expenses questioned It's unclear what Clean & Safe's latest budget includes. A 2021 budget calculated total expenses at around $5 million, including about $858,000 in salaries. Exactly what portion of staff is covered in those salary expenses is murky. Both the Metro Chamber and Downtown Clean & Safe share staff. In fact, the Chamber's CEO and president, Andrew Hoan, is also the CEO and president of Downtown Clean & Safe. The 2021 budget shows $243,000 in "shared administration" salary costs.  Tax documents from 2022 show Hoan drew a $333,000 salary from the Chamber that year. The two organizations also share an executive assistant and an advocacy coordinator. Clean & Safe's operations director and executive director are also listed as part of the Chamber's staff. The Clean & Safe executive director drew a $154,000 salary from the Chamber that same year. Businesses and commercial property owners in the district overwhelmingly support the expansion, saying the frequent cleaning and beefed up security have improved downtown Portland and made it safer for workers and visitors. “We want our associates to feel safe coming into work,” Kelly Mullen, president of Portland’s Safeway and Albertsons division, told the Council on October 31 during its initial consideration of the contract and ESD expansion. Mullen said recently, the Safeway location at 10th and Jefferson has had to reduce store hours and close off an entrance, to improve safety at the grocery store. “We want to be part of the solution and really make our community thrive,” Mullen said. The council also heard from the principal of a private school advocating for the district expansion so her students and staff could receive extra security and clean-up around the campus. One element of Downtown Clean & Safe that’s lauded by nearly every district member, even critics, is the Clean Start program, run by Central City Concern. The program offers janitorial jobs cleaning city streets to people transitioning out of homelessness. For many, it offers a fresh start and a path toward self-sufficiency.  City staff and Clean & Safe reps say the expanded district and new proposed rate structures will offer more transparency, reasonable fee calculations, inflation adjustments, and a cap on rates for condo owners. Several residential ratepayers say the whole Clean & Safe arrangement leaves them with more questions than services received.  John Pumphrey owns a condominium in the downtown district. He and other condo owners say the services they pay for are often duplicative of private security and janitorial services they already pay for through their homeowners association. They also say the services serve mainly to benefit businesses, not residents. “I’m a condo owner in downtown Portland and our building pays $24,000 a year to Clean & Safe and for this, [we] receive next to nothing,” Pumphrey told the Council, asking them to vote against the contract renewal. “What’s really irritating to some of us about Clean & Safe is that 50 percent of what we contribute … is skimmed off the top by the Portland Metro Chamber.” Pumphrey isn’t the only one critical of the unusually high compensation provided to Portland Metro Chamber staff from the Downtown Clean & Safe contract. The open letter to City Council also makes mention of the compensation arrangement, asserting the Clean & Safe contract “pays nearly 50 percent of Business Alliance executive salaries in addition to up to 30% in administrative overhead.” “Many of these executives appear in City lobbying records and in state filings for PACs that advocate for private business interests, often directly in conflict with the will of the voting public,” the letter reads. “It is inappropriate to use public resources to offset the cost of business lobbying.” Devin Reynolds, the city's ESD coordinator, said the arrangement between the Metro Chamber and Dowtown Clean & Safe isn't an anomaly. “Having an ESD contract with a third party to fulfill some, or all their service areas is indeed common across business improvement districts, business improvement areas, and enhanced services districts,” Reynolds told the Mercury earlier this year. Commonplace or not, some downtown ESD ratepayers say they’ve been cut off from any meaningful participation in their district’s oversight or decisions. Anita Davidson, a condo owner in the downtown district, told the Mercury that for years, condo owners have had no representation in district leadership, and there is little to no transparency around operational decisions. “As residential people, we don’t feel we belong there. We don't have a vote in who runs Clean & Safe,” she said. “We can’t even join Portland Metro Chamber, because it's for businesses. I’d like to see Clean & Safe become a public nonprofit. That would solve a lot of things. I still have to make a public records request [just] to see their budget.” In an effort to appease homeowners, the new contract includes a fee cap on residential units. It’s a nice accommodation, but homeowners in the industry-dominated district say what they really want is a way to opt out. There currently is no mechanism to do that, and the process for annexing additional property into an ESD doesn’t require a vote from affected property owners. It’s left up to City Council to approve. Current standards only require the city to notify affected property owners by mail and hold public hearings where they can chime in.  “Unfortunately for ratepayers, the city has not yet, after 30 years, adopted standards for formation, renewal, or expansion of the ESDs,” Davidson told Council. “At some point, we hope and expect that this will happen, although listening tonight, it sounds like it's an all-in-one thing.” Other district members say they disagree with their tax revenue being used to initiate homeless sweeps, and pay for increased police presence. That’s especially true in the case of Sisters of the Road, a homeless services nonprofit and member of the Downtown Portland Clean & Safe district. “From 2016-2020, unhoused residents accounted for over half of arrests made in Portland. Their charges were primarily nonviolent, survival crimes. That same data showed that people are 20 times more likely to experience criminalization in Downtown Clean & Safe versus other areas of the city,” Lauren Armony, program director at Sisters of the Road, told the city in written testimony earlier this year. “Hyper-surveillance has not made our neighborhood any healthier or safer, but further entrenched vulnerable individuals in the cycle of incarceration and poverty.” Organizations like Sisters of the Road say they're irked that the ESD funnels its members’ taxes into the Metro Chamber, which has powerful influence over city politics and often advocates against the city’s vulnerable, unhoused residents–the same population Sisters of the Road is trying to help.  The Clean & Safe contract and district expansion are currently scheduled for a second reading and vote by Portland City Council on Wednesday.