Portland's City Council just wrapped up its fiscal housekeeping with the adoption of the fall technical adjustment ordinance for the fiscal year 2025-2026. This procedure, also known as the Fall TAO, is about as standard as it gets in civic bureaucracy, meant to ensure the city's budget stays on the straight and narrow. As per the City of Portland's announcement, this entails aligning the budget with actual financial outcomes from the last year and truing up the beginning balances, not to mention legislation that mandates a balanced budget.
The twist this fall, however, is the City's General Fund. It's hit a rough patch with a shortfall, something we haven't seen since the before times—pre-pandemic, that is. The usual surplus or underspendings to play with won't happen due to lower-than-forecast Business License Tax collections, coupled with the fact that the one-time federal cash injections for pandemic relief have dried up, and bureau underspending has gone back to normal. Now the City had to scramble to correct an $18 million gap just to keep the budget balanced.
They passed an ordinance that includes a financial shuffle across 48 City funds, mostly tweaking those beginning balances based on updated figures. They've reconciled the General Fund with the actual 2024-2025 numbers and made what they're calling "technical corrections," like popping a required bit of cash into the General Reserve Fund. They've also earmarked short-term rental revenue for the Housing Investment Fund. Any money that's been tied up in contracts for things like shelter operations and violence prevention programs gets to rollover, ensuring those initiatives have funding they were promised.
Among the technical adjustments notably approved was an additional $4.46 million set aside in fiscal year 2026–2027 to help beef up the health fund reserve—an instance of the City Council trying to not only balance the books for the present but also brace for the future. It's critical to point out, the future budget updates also include position adjustments to better support current-year operations. As crunching numbers goes, this is about as practical as it gets.
Finally, it's a bit of good news for the General Fund; some resources returned to the fold. The City got a state refund and corrected something from the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
