PORTLAND, Oregon — Life on the streets is full of uncertainty, but there's one Portland program many homeless people have come to rely on: Portland Street Response (PSR). For the past three years, the mobile mental health crisis team has responded to non-violent calls that would previously have been handled by police.
“Street Response, that was one thing you could always count on out here,” said Irida, who just moved into a shelter site after being homeless for three years. “There's always someone going around trying to make sure everyone's doing OK.”
However the program has faced challenges during its expansion, and the future of PSR is unstable. As first reported by The Oregonian/Oregon Live, the latest potential difficulty came this week when Commissioner Rene Gonzalez proposed cutting $3 million from the program. PSR is part of the fire bureau, which Gonzalez oversees, and the proposed cut is one of several he floated for the bureau in response to an order from Mayor Ted Wheeler for all of Portland's public safety bureaus to find ways to better balance their budgets.
“Unfortunately, they were built with a lot of one-time dollars, and in response to the mayor's direction for budget prep we had to play through scenarios where there isn't new ongoing money to replace that one-time money… hopefully we can find long-term revenues for Portland Street Response and for Portland Fire's core operations that won't necessitate these cuts,” he said.
Gonzalez said he's spend the better part of a year been asking for Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services to help fund the program, but he hasn't yet gotten an answer.
“We don't want to see these cuts. We don't want to see cuts in public safety in general,” he said.
Commissioner Carmen Rubio said she agrees with Gonzalez, arguing that PSR is an important resource at a time when all of Portland's first responder systems are in crisis, and that cutting back on the program would be "terrible for the community."
The potential cuts have also drawn criticism from program supporters outside of city hall. Kaia Sand, executive director of the homeless advocacy nonprofit Street Roots, called the proposed cuts "political gamesmanship." Sand is also part of Friends of Portland Street Response, a community group that has collected 12,000 signatures on a petition calling for the program to be fully funded so it can operate 24/7.
“The support is legion; there are people all over the city who really see this is an effective response. We really need our city leaders to commit to seeing it through,” Sand said.
The program's supporters can point to successes; a recent Portland State University study found that PSR handled 7,418 calls during its second year in operation, resulting in a 3.5% reduction in calls that would have gone to police and a 19% reduction in police responses on non-emergency welfare checks and unwanted person calls.
“This is a program that could use an infusion, rather than have their budget stripped from them,” added Irida.