A Portland police-backed initiative that sought to divert money from the city’s climate action fund will not be on the November ballot after all.

The Portland City Elections office announced Tuesday the petition did not submit enough valid signatures to qualify for the upcoming election.

Supporters of the push to hire 400 more police officers using 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue, or about $50 million a year, criticized that signature review. Portland election office staff, however, said they found flaws with many of the signatures the campaign submitted.

The Enhanced Community Safety Initiative was short by more than 6,300 signatures — despite submitting ten times that many signatures for verification last month.

Backers of the initiative, including former Portland city council candidate Bob Simril and the Portland Police Association, said the funding would help make community policing possible by hiring police who could work alongside mental health, addiction and medical professionals.

Aaron Schmautz, president of the Portland Police Association, said in an emailed statement the goal of the petition was to give voters a voice that has now “been silenced by city and county failures and bad actions.”

“This is a loss for Portlanders who suffer under a police staffing crisis that is damaging the safety, livability, and prosperity of our city,” he said. “On behalf of disenfranchised Portland voters, we intend to file legal action challenging this decision and process. We are not seeking a guaranteed court outcome for the initiative, just a fair, accurate and transparent process.”

Schmautz criticized Portland’s signature verification process, saying the city had questionable procedures and no reliable audit trail.

“After thousands of signatures were removed, data entry errors, questionable verification procedures, haphazard renumbering of signature pages, and no reliable audit trail, the Oregon Secretary of State called for transparency and accountability– yet city and county officials said ‘look away’,” he said.

Late last month, the Safer Portland campaign, which backed the initiative, said the city “arbitrarily discarded” thousands of signatures without proper notification, documentation or a clear paper trail.

But Portland Elections Division Manager Deborah Scroggin told OPB “The record shows the opposite.”

“We have debunked these false claims multiple times and the evidence is available for all to see,” she said in a statement. “We welcome scrutiny, including a court review, but that scrutiny should be rooted in evidence.”

The city rejected more than 8,400 signatures while it was pre-processing petition sheets that would be sent over to Multnomah County officials for verification.

The city and Multnomah County work together to verify signatures. Portland reviews petition sheets, while the county randomly selects a sample of signed petition sheets for signature verification.

According to Portland election staff, half of the 8,400 signatures it initially rejected were removed either because petitioners struck them out before submission or they submitted blank lines. The city said Oregon law does not allow election officials to count stricken or blank lines.

The other half of signatures were removed because they were altered without required verification or they appeared on sheets that did not meet state law requirements, election staff said.

That left about 55,000 signatures for the county to verify.

Through statistical samples, the county found there was a low number of signatures from registered Portland voters. It also removed about 2,000 duplicate signatures.

After the county’s verification process, 34,130 signatures were deemed valid.

The initiative needed at least 40,437 to qualify for the November ballot.

Jenny Lee is with Hands Off PCEF, a campaign that opposed the petition to take Portland Clean Energy Fund dollars away from climate programs to fund police.

She celebrated Safer Portland’s failure to qualify for the November ballot.

“This failure comes after a record number of nearly 100 unique complaints to the Secretary of State that circulators misled signers about the purpose of the measure,” she said in a statement.

OPB obtained most of those complaints through a public records request and analyzed them. That analysis found that dozens of people told the Oregon Secretary of State they felt lied to or were misinformed by canvassers about what the initiative would really do.

Many said they were told it would reduce emergency response times or that the Portland Clean Energy Fund was federally funded.

Safer Portland staff criticized the formal complaints, saying they were “manufactured” and represented a small number of people compared to the thousands of signatures submitted.

The Oregon Secretary of State is investigating the complaints, and could issue penalties depending on what it finds.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/08/04/initiative-seeking-to-hire-police-with-portland-climate-funds-fails-to-qualify/