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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (May 21, 2025)
May 21, 2025 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3 News cont’d from pg 1 then we’re going to get them homed and then we’re going to get them placed into services and then we’re going to scale down. My expectation is that we will restore (Prosper Portland’s) funding on an ongoing basis next year.” But Prosper Portland, its partners and sup- porters argue that such a “ We see it as working alongside council move would be counter- productive to the city’s mission of inclusive economic development. The agency’s citywide programming includes the Inclusive Business Resource Network, the Neighborhood Prosper- ity Network, the O ce of Film and Events, My People’s Market and the new O ce of Small Busi- ness. Prosper Portland also offers workforce development programs, technical and financial assistance for small busi- nesses and initiatives to attract employers who pay livable wages. “If we are outside of on- going funds, we automat- ically are not a part of the formula that the city bud- get o ce would build for next year,” Chabre Vick- ers, director of equity, policy and communica- tions for Prosper Port- land, told The Skanner. “So our team now needs to also look at, how can we reasonably work with a staff who don’t know if they’re going to have a job or not? It throws ev- erything into disarray. “Not to mention, we have multi-year part- nerships with folks like in our inclusive busi- ness resource network, Townhall and we fund direct jobs across dozens of part- ners that come from these dollars, so they too are wondering. These are staffers that are em- bedded across the com- munity that wonder if they have a job.” Deep Cuts The first cohort of the new city council has an unenviable task in re- fining Mayor Keith Wil- son’s $8.5 billion budget proposal, which address- es a general fund gap that could be as much as $100 million. Inflation and a persistent housing crisis have strained the city’s resources, and Wil- son’s proposals included cutting 180 positions in permitting and parks and recreation. Dunphy and Green’s proposed amendment would end the city’s ongoing general fund allocation to Prosper Portland, which would amount to about $11 mil- lion in the coming year. Prosper Portland said that this change, along- side another $3.7 million in funding changes from the city, would mean a $14.7 million cut to their organization. “My amendment is about asking Prosper Portland to use their sav- ings to this year help us bridge a gap so that we don’t have to cut parks maintenance and we don’t have to cut permit issuance,” Dunphy told The Skanner. “I’m really worried about the per- mitting bureau. If the economic development agency is wildly success- ful, we will not have any- body in the permitting bureau to go and issue the permits for those new businesses or those new apartments or what- ever it’s going to be, be- cause of the scale of these cont’d from pg 1 the warning signs of gaslighting in Or- egon Senate Bill 702, a proposal to ban flavored tobacco and menthol. “Anything that’s banned becomes contraband, anything that is contra- band is illegal, and anything illegal is a police and law enforcement issue—pe- riod,” stated NY State Police Sr. Investi- gator Elliot Boyce. The panelists also reiterated the need to address the root causes of addiction and to understand the underlying criminal and economic realities of the proposed flavored tobacco and men- thol ban, especially in marginalized communities. Sherman Lea, Jr., NABCJ President: “We travel around the country to have conversations - asking hard questions - about the impact of local, state, and federal policy issues. We hope to con- tinue to be a resource for Oregon law enforcement-related questions and concerns.” PHOTO COURTESY CITY OF VANCOUVER Prosper Plans for Vancouver On Monday, April 21, Vancouver City Council adopted the City’s first-ever, Five-Year Economic Development Strategy. In alignment with the City’s core values of sustainability and resiliency, and livability, the inclusive strategy is designed to help support economic growth and address growing disparities within the community, and is organized around four primary goals: Establish pathways to accessible quality jobs, create opportunities for intergenerational wealth, position Vancouver as an inclusive center of innovation and entrepreneurship, and invest in neighborhood commercial districts. cuts.” Prosper Portland has pushed back, arguing that business licenses contribute about $220 million to the gener- al fund and that under Dunphy and Green’s pro- posed amendment, none of that money would fund support for small businesses. Prosper Portland also took issue with Dunphy’s characterization of their strategic investment fund (SIF) as a simple savings account or, as Dunphy has referred to it on social media, a “slush fund.” “Even if we put some SIF dollars there, the SIF corpus would be deplet- ed as the year goes by,” Vickers said in response to Dunphy’s suggestion. “You take ongoing (fi- nancing) and replace it with one-time, and every year it continues to go down and you lose not Reparations have been well document- ed. And if anyone reads the recommendations of past reports, one would see that this governor has been si- lently focused on resolving these inequities.” Over the last 25 years, Moore empha- sized, five reparations-re- lated studies were conduct- ed, including the Maryland Lynching Truth and Recon- ciliation Commission and the State Commission to Coordinate the Study, Com- memoration, and Impact of the History and Legacy of Slavery in Maryland. Moore’s firm “no” empha- sizes that it’s time for “ac- tion,” not another study. On Friday, Maryland’s first Black governor spoke extensively about his veto only staff capacity and expertise, but these oth- er programs that they’re saying are going to hap- pen in different places – we just don’t know how they’d work that out.” TIF And SIF Prosper Portland over- sees tax increment fi- nancing (TIF) districts throughout the city -- neighborhoods that may suffer from deteriorat- ing facilities and lagging resources. Through this process, the agency over- sees upgrades to parks, streets and community areas and centers. TIF funds can only be used within such dis- tricts. Vickers explained that a strategic invest- ment fund (SIF) has al- lowed Prosper Portland to serve the 85% of the city not in a TIF district. “Our SIF fund goes even further than that because it allows us to make loans through our community that also al- low them to purchase and acquire real estate,” she said. “So for us it really is about how we ensure that folks can get access to the market, that we can ensure that we’re utilizing all of our tools in both a responsible way and a way that I feel like is reflective of communi- ty request, and respon- sive to council request as well.” In a letter to the city council, Prosper Port- land board chair Gustavo Cruz and interim exec- utive director Shea Fla- herty Betin warned that cutting the $11 million general fund allocation from their agency’s bud- get, and asking them to make up the difference from their SIF, would mean a loss of 19 small business and commer- cial property loans they would normally be able to offer within the city. If the city were to decline providing general fund allocations in the future, Cruz and Flaherty Be- tin said the SIF would be fully spent within three years. Dunphy had a different view. “Those are tax dollars that should have been invested in those com- munities,” Dunphy told The Skanner. “It wasn’t meant to be used to con- tinue the process of what Prosper has been doing, which is deeply unac- countable.” Tony Barnes, chief fi- nancial o cer at Prosper Portland, told The Skan- ner the SIF was funded by repayments on loans that had been given in TIFs. “The concept of build- ing this TIF is that over See PROSPER on page 7 cont’d from pg 1 decision at the NAACP na- tional board meeting in Baltimore City, where the organization is headquar- tered. Sources close to the meeting say the governor was “clear” in his explana- tion. In Washington, D.C., reparations also dominated conversations last Thurs- day on Capitol Hill. Demo- crats reintroduced the idea of reparations with a reso- lution that offers trillions of federal dollars in repa- rations to Black Americans to repair the damage of the enslavement of Africans in America for 250 years, followed by Jim Crow and the ongoing effects of other federally supported dis- criminatory policies. His- torically, there have been instances of reparations in this country—such as for Japanese Americans in- “ $38 million was awarded terned during World War II. $38 million was awarded in total, with each victim receiving a $20,000 payout. However, Black Americans have not received anything comparable for the enslave- ment of Africans in Ameri- ca, during which enslavers profited off free labor. In 2021, Evanston, Illinois, created a reparations plan for its Black residents. Ad- ditionally, Georgetown Uni- versity created a new fund that awards $400,000 an- nually to community-based projects benefiting the de- scendants of the men, wom- en, and children enslaved on Jesuit plantations in Mary- land. A senior White House O cial said that when it comes to reparations, Pres- ident Trump “is creating an economy that’s gonna work for all Americans. And if the Democrats really want to uplift the Black commu- nity, they would support the President’s One Big, Beau- tiful bill that would bring about record tax cuts to this economy, which would ben- efit Black Americans.” The President’s bill would re- move undocumented immi- grants from Medicaid, give Social Security recipients a reprieve, and eliminate tax- es on overtime pay and tips.
