At the City of Portland’s District 3 “Budget Open House” held on a Wednesday evening in April at Marysville Elementary School, elected officials laid out the difficult financial choices facing the city and asked residents to help set priorities for the year ahead.
Over the course of the evening, the city’s budget staff – and Mayor Wilson, and Councilors Tiffany Koyama Lane, Angelita Morillo, and Steve Novick – described a budget picture they said was constrained, painful, and dependent on clear guidance from the community.
Providing an overview, Alison Perkins, Public Information Officer for City Operations and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, described this as one of four open houses meant “to start engaging with the general public about the budget process.” She said that the city was “starting with a lot of information gathering,” and that “the budget process has changed”, and was “different from last year and the year before.”…