Three businesses were fed. A string of early morning burglaries in northeast Portland. City in decline. Robbed and carjacked at gunpoint. This is not the city he once knew. Crime is skyrocketing, and the homeless crisis has reached a breaking point.

Handings, sprawled and massacred. Red crisis. How and why is this happening?

Welcome to Portland.

It is extremely frustrating for us to take the steps that we believe, and frankly, that we know we need to take as a municipal government to address open drug use or to address addiction or to address unsanctioned, dangerous, and squalled camps in our community. We're responsible to the public for the right of way. We're responsible to the public for public safety, and yet we don't have all the tools we need at the municipal level to be able to get done what we need to have done. And so the courts often intercede, as they did on our time, place, and manner restrictions around camping. And of course, The legislature preempts us from being able to enforce drug use laws here in the city of Portland. I've been very clear about what my goals are. I do not want anyone using or dealing drugs on our streets. I We do not want anyone camping on our streets in unsanctioned homeless camps. All of our policies are in alignment with those goals, but with the understanding that we'll be humane in our approach. We will try to offer people other tailored services, whether it's drug treatment, whether it is behavioral health services, whether it's job training, whatever people need to get off and stay off the streets and stop using drugs and go into treatment and get the help they need to recover their lives and improve our community.

But I need the governor and I need our legislature and I need our county government to work with us to get it done. I realized that for a lot of people, that means they're going to have to change their views, particularly around homeless camp sweeps, their views around drug use in other areas. But if they really want to see this community improve the way it needs to improve, they need to get into line with what this city council is doing. We're unified as a city council, and we have a great team here at City Hall working hard. But if the courts and the legislature and other political players in the state who hold sway over what we do continue to block us, it makes our job all that much harder. We'll work around them. We'll find other solutions, but it would be great if we could all get on the same page.

Anyone who walks around the streets of Portland is likely to see someone who is in the grips of fentanyl addiction. This literally kills hundreds of Portlanders. Every year, we have to do a much better job of managing this. I think given how dangerous this drug is, criminalizing it With the goal of using that as an incentive to connect people to treatment is really important. But I'll tell you, even beyond that, there's the question of, should we recriminalize the consumption of fentanyl? Another question which needs to be in this legislative session, which means before 2024 is over, the governor and our state lawmakers really need to give local governments like Portland the authority to regulate the consumption of drugs on our streets and sidewalks. The city of Portland can make rules about where you can smoke a cigarette, but I cannot make any binding rules about where you smoke fentanyl. That is part of the reason why Portland looks the way it does, and that needs to change, and it's within the power of our state law makers to get that done. And I'm calling on our partners down in Salem to please do that in the short session.

We need to give tools to our first responders so they can take action. So if someone is smoking fentanyl in public and it's causing harm to those who are trying to access the sidewalk, then the police need to be able to respond to that. And so I think it's just common sense. We want to make sure that we edit 110 before it just completely goes away. Oregonians are not happy with how it's been implemented, and it's our job as legislators and public servants to listen to that and admit that we have to roll it out with some improvement. The no daytime camping was a big deal, but now it's locked up in the courts a bit, and we're going to end up winning this challenge because the fact is we need to provide services for people who are on the streets during the day. We need to free up our public right away so that people can merely, if you're an elder and you live downtown, you should have the right to walk around your blocks peacefully. If you're a parent and you want to access a park, you want to go there without having to go around people doing drug use.