In all the election-year chatter about Portland’s one ballot proposition, no one has yet revealed the true driver behind the proposal masquerading as a democracy-building initiative. Pull back the curtain, and one discovers an out-of-state group whose very survival depends on selling consulting services to cities that have taken the bait.
That organization has set its sights on liberal Portland, irrespective of the fact that this city spent 2026 cutting core services because of severe budget shortfalls. In this fiscal environment, the City Council struggled to find money to save the jobs of essential-service workers but failed to stop the layoffs of 70.
Enter Measure 26-267, which would compel the city to create an entirely new spending program even while existing services struggle.
The measure, which its backers call Your 2 Cents PDX, would amend the city charter to require the City Council to set aside at least 2 percent of the general fund’s discretionary budget for participatory budgeting: residents propose spending ideas, delegates shape those ideas into projects, and a citywide vote determines the winners. The city’s ballot summary estimates the program would cost $16.4 million in fiscal 2027-28 and $17 million the year after, and it would begin next July if voters approve it.1 The initiative qualified with 78,743 signatures, the largest filing in the city’s modern history, of which elections officials verified 41,860.2
The Endorsers: A Vendor on the Slate
The endorsement list is a census of the Portland left. The Coalition for Communities of Color, the Multnomah County Democrats, the Working Families Party, Imagine Black, Unite Oregon, and the Democratic Socialists of America all signed on. One name on the list comes neither from Portland nor from the local volunteer sector. The Participatory Budgeting Project, a Brooklyn nonprofit founded in 2009, co-endorsed this measure to create, in a city where it has no office, demand for the services it sells.
The Project’s business is selling cities on participatory budgeting and then consulting on its implementation. Headquartered in New York with a second office in Oakland, it calls itself the support structure behind most participatory budgeting processes in the United States. It charges implementation fees of $20,000 to $65,000 per process. Seattle’s $27 million program appears on its client list.3 For such an organization, a charter amendment mandating a permanent program in a city of Portland’s size is not a policy outcome. It is a market, and no competitor is better placed to seize it.
The Project’s Finances
This outfit’s finances explain their endorsement. Since 2009, it has taken in $13.9 million over 111 grants from 37 funders, and the recent entries in that record read as institutional distress. Its co-executive leadership turned over completely between December 2023 and July 2024. Its fiscal 2024 filing recorded a deficit of $540,556.4 The Ford Foundation, once a reliable patron, ended the relationship in 2023 with a grant that Ford’s paperwork labeled “tie-off general support,” the language a foundation uses when it means goodbye.5 Founder Josh Lerner had already departed for a separate outfit, People Powered, taking Hewlett money with him.6 The Project’s earned revenue is shrinking, so it depends more on new contracts. Portland, preparing to route $16 million in public funds that includes a percentage for administration, through a delegate structure that does not yet exist, may offer a financial reprieve.
The Project’s funding record shows a pattern of dependence on ballot measure success. Robert Wood Johnson is now the largest single funder, giving $1.5 million in 2023 and another $1.3 million in 2025, both earmarked to spread participatory budgeting through New Jersey, and both framing the practice as a health intervention: participatory democracy recast as a social determinant of well-being.7 Freedom Together, formerly the JPB Foundation, raised its general operating support from $150,000 in 2020 to $450,000 in 2024. The California Endowment underwrote expansion in its home state.8 The pattern is a national organization sustained by national philanthropy, pursuing local mandates that turn grant dependence into earned contracts.
From Porto Alegre to Portland
In theory, participatory budgeting puts public money under residents’ control. The practice began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, under a Workers’ Party government, and there it governed a substantial share of the municipal budget, an actual transfer of fiscal authority to residents. New York City has used participatory budgeting since 2011, and in 2018 its voters wrote a citywide program into the city charter without fixing a funding level. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2020 pandemic emergency order then suspended participatory budgeting and delayed the citywide program until 2022. In its most recent cycle, approximately 2 percent of adult New Yorkers took part.9 The democratic case may seem sound: budgets encode priorities and most residents have little say in how they are set.
In Porto Alegre, a leftist government used participatory budgeting to redistribute public money. Portland’s Measure 26-267 uses the rhetoric of popular power without the substance. It redirects $16 million to a program implemented by a paid intermediary. This is the only “power” transfer in the proposal. The budget that funds police, fire, parks, and homeless shelters is decided as before—by accountable elected officials.
The campaign does not mention one provision of the measure. The citywide vote on residents’ proposals would not be subject to city or state election law. A parallel balloting apparatus, standing outside the rules that govern every other public election in Oregon, would allocate a significant amount of tax dollars each year. The delegates’ good faith aside, a spending process exempt from election law raises an accountability question the democratic premise ignores.
Labor Against the Caucus
On this measure, organized labor and the council’s socialists have landed on opposite sides. Six of the twelve city councilors support the measure: Candace Avalos, Mitch Green, Angelita Morillo, Tiffany Koyama Lane, Sameer Kanal, and Jamie Dunphy. Four of the six (Morillo, Kanal, Koyama Lane, and Green) are members of the Democratic Socialists of America; Avalos and Dunphy caucus with them but are not official DSA members.10
Opposition has come from a direction that cuts across the left’s familiar lines. Mayor Keith Wilson opposes the measure. So does the vast majority of organized labor. The Northwest Oregon Labor Council has argued that taking 2 percent off the top diverts money from such essential services as parks, community centers, Portland Street Response, and firefighting, and puts the jobs of the city workers who deliver those services at risk.11 Every dollar routed into a delegate-designed allocation is a dollar removed from a budget already in crisis.
That divide should trouble anyone who casts Portland politics as a contest between a progressive council and its opponents. Here the union movement, the institution with the longest record of defending public workers, joins the mayor to oppose a measure the progressive caucus calls democratic reform. When labor and the council's socialists find themselves at odds over a budget question, the disagreement is worth a closer look at who would benefit.
The campaign’s money comes from the groups closest to the program it would create. Its political action committee has reported about $1.2 million in contributions, drawn primarily from Participatory Budgeting Oregon, East County Rising, and the Next Up Action Fund, and about $1.06 million of that total came as donated services rather than cash.12 Participatory Budgeting Oregon promotes the practice statewide. The Participatory Budgeting Project, its national counterpart in Brooklyn, endorsed the measure and is one of the few organizations equipped to administer such a program. None of this breaks any law; it is how advocacy works. Still, a reform presented as the people’s voice is being financed by the organizations that would gain from its passage.
The Choice in November
Whether Portlanders should oppose this measure based on these facts is not the point. Certainly, a resident might conclude that $16 million in participatory allocation is worth the vendor’s fees and the pressure on the general fund, irrespective of the whiff of self-dealing by the idea’s advocates. It may be defensible, even if it is not the altruistic democracy concept the campaign is selling. A voter may not care that the measure is the product of a national consultancy positioned to win the contract, and the advocacy groups that paid for the signatures and stand to profit from redirected funds. It would be hard to fathom, however, that Portlanders to say yes to an expensive proposal in the same year the city cut basic services and 70 city workers lost their jobs.
Voters who will sit in judgment of this proposal should realize that people who are not registered voters may soon decide how to spend tax dollars that are plundered from essential services or voter-approved earmarked funds, with the cost of staffing and running the program skimmed off the top, and a New York outfit with money problems of its own positioned to collect. “Participatory democracy” as a noble experiment is tainted by these facts.
Notes
1. Measure 26-267 requires “at least 2% of the city’s adopted General Fund discretionary ongoing expenses,” with the City estimating $16.4 million in FY 2027-28 and $17.0 million in FY 2028-29 and the program operational July 2027. Multnomah County Voters’ Pamphlet, Measure 26-267 (multco.us); Portland City Auditor, ballot title.
2. Backers submitted 78,743 signatures; the City Auditor verified at least 41,860 as valid (statistical sampling certified by Multnomah County), above the 40,437 required. Willamette Week, "Participatory Budget Initiative Backers Submit Whopping 78,000 Signatures," July 8, 2026, and "Community Budgeting Initiative Qualifies for November Ballot," July 23, 2026.
3. Self-description and fee range: Participatory Budgeting Project (participatorybudgeting.org). Seattle’s $27 million program: Seattle Times editorial, Nov. 2023, and City of Seattle Office for Civil Rights.
4. Grant totals compiled from Candid / Foundation Directory. Fiscal 2024 deficit and the 2023-24 leadership turnover: Participatory Budgeting Project, IRS Form 990 (via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).
5. Ford Foundation Grants database (fordfoundation.org/grants/), 2023 grant to the Participatory Budgeting Project.
6. People Powered (people-powered.org); William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Grants database (hewlett.org/grants/).
7. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Grants Explorer (rwjf.org).
8. Grant records via Candid / Foundation Directory; Freedom Together Foundation (formerly JPB) and The California Endowment grant listings.
9. 2018 NYC Charter Revision Commission, ballot Question 1 (Nov. 2018), creating the Civic Engagement Commission and directing a citywide participatory budgeting program, with no funding level fixed. Pandemic delay: Gotham Gazette. Participation: NYC Civic Engagement Commission, “The People’s Money” results (approximately 140,000 participants in its most recent cycle).
10. Portland DSA endorsed candidates (portlanddsa.org/endorsed-candidates/); Willamette Week, “One Thing Has Changed at Portland City Hall: The Socialists Are Setting the Agenda,” July 16, 2025.
11. Willamette Week, “Participatory Budgeting Measure Faces Organized Opposition, Including From the Mayor,” Aug. 31, 2026.
12. Oregon Secretary of State, ORESTAR campaign finance records, committee “Community Budgeting for All” (filer ID 23058).
There $16 Million Reasons to VOTE NO on Community Budgeting for All (Except You and Me)!!
I wrote about this absurd proposal earlier in a piece for the NW Examiner.
https://nwexaminer.com/p/follow-the-money-on-portlands-participatory
At first glance, this measure sounds fair: let residents decide how public money is spent. Who could oppose giving Portlanders a greater voice? But on closer look, it just doesn’t add up!
The proposal would amend Portland's Charter to require the city to forever hand over at least 2% of discretionary spending — initially $16 million— to a participatory budgeting process, no matter what else the city needs.
Portland is already facing an estimated $160 million budget shortfall. There is no spare $16 million. The result will mean fewer 911 dispatchers, slower fire and police response, more people sleeping unsheltered, plus cuts to parks, transportation, housing, and more layoffs.
Ask proponents, including council candidates who support this measure, a simple question: What will you cut to pay for it? They've refused to answer, asking voters to trust that the money will simply be found later, at everyone else's expense.
The only funding sources the proponents use as examples involve one-time housing and arts tax funds found during the past year to have accumulated rather than being spent for their intended programs? In the midst of a housing crisis, and school funding crises, do we really want to raid those funds even if it were legally permissible? And then when such accounts are drained, where does the money come from?
There's another troubling problem: who’s actually bankrolling this campaign and hiding it from you? While the article mentions the nominal funders,—some nonprofits— they have refused to disclose where the money really came from.
Voters deserve to know who is funding this scheme to permanently change how their tax dollars are spent. Portlanders shouldn't be locked into a permanent $16 million commitment by people unwilling to show their faces.
Lastly, claims that the community decides are intentionally misleading. Not all Portlanders receive a ballot. In Seattle, fewer than 1% of registered voters took part in deciding how millions in public money were spent. A tiny, self-selected group deciding how millions get spent isn't democracy.
Our elected council answers to all Portlanders. Our budget should remain transparent, accountable, and flexible enough to meet the needs of the whole community—not permanently siphoned off for a process dominated by an unrepresentative few.
VOTE NO on Community Budgeting for All (Except You and Me)!