28-06-2025
‘Our youth can't wait': Portland City Council approves $65 million in Children's Levy grants
PORTLAND, Ore. () – Portland City Councilors unanimously passed an emergency ordinance to approve funding recommendations for millions in Portland Children's Levy grants after rejecting them earlier this month.
On June 4, councilors voted 7-5 to reject the Portland Children's Levy's nearly $65 million in grant requests. Then councilors passed an emergency ordinance to extend all current grants for a year, even to groups that the PCL Allocation Committee had decided not to recommend for funding.
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Councilor Steve Novick was one of the five who voted against rejecting the requests. On Wednesday, he introduced an ordinance to revoke the extension and go back to pass the recommended grants. He called the Children's Levy citizen involvement on steroids.
'Dozens of volunteers going through an elaborate process to come up with recommendations,' he said. 'And I would like anybody who votes against returning the recommendations of those advisory committees and of the staff to say nothing about citizen involvement in the future.'
Since the ordinance was added to the agenda on Wednesday, that opened the door for public testimony. Many, like Triple Threat Mentoring Founder and CEO Nike Greene, jumped on the opportunity to voice their concerns.
'Our youth can't wait,' she said. 'We are the leaders on the front lines, mentoring, guiding and protecting Black and brown youth across Portland. The PCL funding is not a luxury, it's a lifeline. You said you wanted to hear from Community Center our voices even now, you heard from our community when we said we wanted new, small and emerging organizations to access PCL funding.'
Others highlighted the diversity of the PLC Allocation Committee, urging the City Council to change its mind.
'We helped shape the recommendations to ensure that the widest variety of communities and the widest possible amount of supports could be provided to communities that need it,' Deian Salazar with the PLC Advisory Council said. 'This portfolio extended to college-age youth for the first time. Even with less funding, we were getting out to more organizations than ever before in an equitable way.'
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After even more testimony, and much discussion between councilors, the ordinance passed unanimously.
'I have something of a reputation for making mistakes and then apologizing repeatedly until I'm blue in the face, sometimes over a period of years,' Novick said. 'And I don't think that– I don't think that doing that is essential to being a good public official, but being willing to change your mind and make mistakes is so. I really appreciate serving in a body where there are people willing to do that.'
Novick also took time to thank community members who came out to testify without knowing if they would get the chance to. Other councilors apologized to those in the audience, saying they got the first vote wrong but were glad to change it today.
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