Beaverton City Council Special Session on Fiscal Sustainability and Service Evaluation - April 14, 2026
Beaverton City Council Special Session on Fiscal Sustainability and Service Evaluation
On April 14, 2026, the Beaverton City Council held a special work session focused on the city's fiscal sustainability action plan. The meeting was called to order by Mayor Beatty, with no public comment taken. Assistant City Manager Elizabeth Coffey presented an overview of the city's services evaluation exercise, which examines how general fund services are classified, funded, and what impacts would result from future reductions. The council discussed key takeaways across multiple departments, including police, municipal court, community development, public works, library, external programs, and support services. The goal was to inform council about service choices and to identify topics for deeper future work sessions.
Discussion Items
- Service Evaluation Overview: Coffey explained that 67% of staff time is spent on mandated or operationally necessary services. Discretionary services, while logical targets for reduction, have significant community and organizational impacts. Additional reductions risk lowering service levels below current standards. Efficiencies are possible but often require initial investment and may not eliminate staff positions.
- Police Department: Chief Jepson noted that 71% of police time is mandated. Discretionary services include criminal investigations (450 serious crimes/year, 17% involving children), bike team (200+ contacts/year), and specialized one-FTE programs (violence reduction, family violence reduction, victim services). Reductions to detectives would shift workload to patrol, potentially slowing response times. Proactive policing (e.g., bike team) helps reduce larger problems and supports other departments like code compliance and homeless outreach.
- Municipal Court: Court Administrator Katrina and Judge Britton reported that 71% of staff time is mandated, with a $6.6 million program budget and $1.9 million general fund impact after revenue/grants. Discretionary specialty courts (Be Sober DUII program, behavioral health) achieve 90% and 92% non-reconviction rates within three years, respectively. New photo enforcement cameras on TV Highway (expected May 2026) could generate at least $1.3 million annually in fines. A grant-funded assessment recommends modernization, better scheduling, and exploring restorative justice programs. Eliminating the local court would reduce access for defendants and victims, increase police overtime, and lose treatment programs not offered at county circuit court.
- Community Development: Dan Weinhammer presented that community development (CDD) has 57.75 general fund staff and a $13.5 million budget. 14.3 FTE (25%) are discretionary, driven by council and community priorities. Examples include sidewalk repair grants (oversubscribed), graffiti removal, business retention/recruitment, affordable housing support, arts programs (e.g., 1,700 attendees at Tiny Dances), and event coordination. Revenue recovery from fees is $3.5 million, leaving a gap of ~$10 million. Councilors noted the need for more precise cost recovery and questioned service level estimates (e.g., 0.2 FTE for 8 sidewalk grants). Mayor Beatty emphasized that enterprise zone abatements and fee studies need to align with council’s cost recovery direction.
- Public Works: Public works general fund portion includes 33.9 staff, 96% mandated or operationally necessary. Services like graffiti removal (300 tags/year), shopping cart removal (1,250 hours/year), flower baskets, and facility maintenance are highly visible. The city is below industry standard for facility maintenance (1 per 75,000 sq ft vs. 1 per 50,000). Deferred maintenance is costly long-term. Councilors discussed shifting shopping cart responsibility back to stores via fees or mechanisms.
- Library: 55.18 staff, 84% mandated. The library is funded 55% by county IGA and 42% by general fund (~$5 million). Discretionary services (makerspace, early literacy, outreach) are loved but vulnerable. A strategic plan will come in May 2026. Centralization through the cooperative is expected to save some staff time, but the library still faces a significant deficit. Mayor Beatty expressed disappointment in the cooperative negotiation and urged council to advocate with county commissioners.
- City Manager's Office External Programs: Includes community services (homelessness response), sustainability/recycling, Office of Equity and Inclusion, Center for Mediation and Dialogue, Events, and Neighborhoods. 18.75 staff, 48% mandated. Programs are partially funded by grants. There is potential to increase cost recovery through event sponsorships/participation fees and mediation training fees. Council discussed insourcing services to smaller cities as a revenue model.
- Support Services: Finance, IT, City Attorney, HR, City Recorder, Community Engagement. 87.9 staff, 58% mandated or operationally necessary. Reductions here create operational fragility, as many roles are thinly staffed with single experts. Cuts shift work to operational departments, degrading service quality and increasing risk (e.g., compliance, cybersecurity).
Key Outcomes
- Councilors expressed the need for more precise data to make budgetary decisions, particularly around FTE estimates and cost recovery gaps.
- Several councilors indicated interest in deeper dives into specific topics (e.g., police investigations, municipal court photo enforcement, community development cost recovery). The city manager noted that a municipal court deep dive is planned for fall 2026 after new cameras are operational.
- No formal votes were taken. The session was informational to prepare council for upcoming budget discussions and a potential levy.
- Councilor Tivnon raised the challenge of communicating service reductions to the public, suggesting that visible cuts (e.g., flower baskets, graffiti response) might help tell the story of fiscal strain. Mayor Beatty countered that the city must first communicate the value of existing services before cutting them.
- The recording of this session will be shared with budget committee members to aid their understanding of the fiscal landscape.
Meeting Transcript
Will the city recorder please call the role? Counselor Duggar. Councillor Hartmeyer Prigg. Here. Councilor Hassan. Here. Counselor Kimmy. Councilor Teeter. Councilor Tifnon. Here. Mayor Beatty. Here. Okay, as a reminder, this is a special session of the city council, so we're not taking public comment this evening. With that, I'm going to turn it over to our assistant city manager. I'm just going to turn it over to the city manager. Whatever. I'll answer to either. All right. Good evening. I'm Elizabeth Coffey and I'm the interim slash assistant city manager. And I'm joined here today by Dan Weinhammer, the other assistant city manager, as well as members of our executive leadership team and some staff subject matter experts to talk a little bit about fiscal sustainability and specifically our efforts to really evaluate our services. So I'll apologize in advance, I have some allergies this season, so you may hear me have to clear my throat or my voice kind of get a little scratchy. So bear with me. So tonight we're going to go over why service evaluation matters, so why we have chosen to do this exercise as part of our fiscal sustainability action plan. We will go over the services evaluation overview. We'll talk about some key takeaways that apply to pretty much all of the departments that we evaluated. And then we'll take some time to go over services review a little bit more in depth. So we've grouped departments together and we'll share some key takeaways that are specific to those services. We'll pause for five minutes after each service area for a quick five-minute question and answer period. So if there's something that comes up for you right away, you'll have a chance to ask that. But if we run out of time in those five minutes before we move on to the next service, don't worry, just write your questions down and we'll we have a question and answer period at the end. So our goals for this meeting by the end of the meeting, our hope is that council would be informed about the city, the services the city offers and the choices that can be made as we move forward with fiscal sustainability work. We hope that you have the opportunity to ask questions and we'd love to hear your feedback around next steps. In terms of that feedback, we're curious if there's any topics or services that you would like to do a deeper dive into at a future council work session. I do want to be respectful of your time when we're when I'm scheduling special work sessions like this. So I will be listening for consensus for at least four counselors that are interested in doing that deep dive into any particular topic before we move forward. So moving on to why does service evaluation matters? So I'll back up uh real quick just in case there's anybody listening tonight that's not aware, but council has a fiscal sustainability action plan that they've been working on for the past several years, and we recently updated that plan, and there's a number of short-term actions that we're working on that will uh hopefully guide us towards future financial stability. Many of them are related to revenues, but there are some related to expenses, such as the soft hiring freeze that you see here on the screen, for example, uh, where we are being strategic about what vacant positions that we fill. Um and what we're talking about tonight is really service evaluation, and that is taking a close look at all of our services, what's the level of service being offered, and what would be the impact if we reduce that service further because we've made a number of actions over the last several years to reduce our expenses and cut staff positions, as you see here on the screen. And those have had a number of impacts to date. Um we have reduced our proactive uh police bike team, we have eliminated dedicated mental health response team resource, we've reduced our community organization grants that we offer. We've have reduced hours at Murray Shoals Library Branch, and we have overall slower response and project completion time due to reduced staff capacity citywide. Lots of other things that I could list. For example, uh code compliance lost a position, and that means we're able to be less proactive. Um, and we case closures take longer, especially during the busy summer season. And so to make additional reductions, which is something that's part of our fiscal sustainability plan, there will be impacts to the way that we deliver service and the level of service that we're able to offer. So we want council and the community to be able to better understand those impacts. So before we dive into the services evaluation itself, next slide, please, we'll talk a little bit about how services are funded. And so you can see here on the screen a graph from fiscal year 25-26, all of the funds that we have in the city and in our in Bureau.
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