Portlanders rallying to infuse the city’s budget process with more public input are a step closer to getting their proposal on the November ballot.

The group says they plan to submit more than 75,000 signatures to the city elections office

Monday, far surpassing the required 40,437 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

The ballot measure would create a “participatory budgeting program” in the city. Under that model, the public would be able to vote on how to spend no less than 2% of the city’s annual discretionary budget (roughly $15 million in the current fiscal year).

The campaign’s chief petitioner, Jim Labbe, is the executive director of Participatory Budgeting Oregon, a nonprofit that advocates for this kind of budgeting system. He said the program could help address Portlanders’ skepticism about how funding decisions are made by city officials.

“Portland has a public trust crisis, really, around how it spends money or doesn’t spend money on the public’s behalf,” Labbe said. “That solution is not going to happen just from the top down. It’s got to be from the bottom up, and participatory budgeting is really a demonstrated mechanism to do that.”

Under the proposal, any Portlander could submit ideas on projects they believe warrant city spending. Those proposals would be vetted by an oversight committee, as well as city staff, before advancing to a public vote.

Unlike some Portland proposals, this isn’t a novel program: San Francisco, Chicago, New York City and other jurisdictions in the United States have similar programs. In Seattle, for instance, participatory budgeting has steered funding toward an urban agriculture program, a mental health crisis response team, new public bathrooms and a violence prevention program.

This is advocates’ second attempt at putting participatory budgeting on Portland’s ballot. A similar proposal in 2024 failed to collect enough signatures. To avoid a similar outcome this time, petitioners started collecting signatures nearly a year in advance of the July 6 deadline.

The group’s Community Budgeting for All political action committee has raised roughly $450,000 in donations, largely from political nonprofit PACs like East County Rising Action Fund and Next Up Action Fund, which aren’t required to share the names of their contributors.

The measure follows yet another bruising budget season in Portland, where city councilors spent long hours debating budget proposals that failed to advance. The result was a final spending plan largely similar to the initial budget introduced by Mayor Keith Wilson.

Each year, the public is told to lobby their councilors to influence the city budget. But those requests aren’t always heard or reflected in budget talks, let alone supported by the majority of the council.

Labbe said the proposed program could offer a more reliable way for the public to decide how their money is spent.

“Having a recurring process in which residents can register their priorities and create data to inform the budget,” Labbe said. “That’s the missing piece.”

The city elections office must verify the submitted signatures before the proposal formally qualifies for the fall ballot.

The proposal is one of two en route to a Nov. 3 ballot in Portland.

A second measure, which suggests using the city’s climate fund to pay for new police officers, also appears to have gathered enough signatures by this week’s deadline.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/06/portland-ballot-measure-for-more-public-say-in-city-budget-clears-hurdle/