Business Leadership Summit

Hello Portland! 

How are we doing this afternoon?

I love being in this room every year with so many incredible leaders – your energy, your optimism, and your willingness to roll your sleeves up when the going gets tough and work together to make things better. 

And, I can tell you, it is working. When I stood before you last year, the Portland Central City Task Force – a group of elected, business and community leaders focused on bringing Portland’s bright future into fruition – had just issued our recommendations.

Everything from declaring a fentanyl emergency to cleaning up our streets made the list. One year later, the collective effort that the task force brought together not only delivered on those recommendations but have gone above and beyond. And we continue to see the impact on the streets of Portland. We have also brought home some incredible wins on a national scale: Oregon businesses have received significant CHIPs Act awards, and our state has seen hundreds of millions in additional resources from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Our love and legacy of women’s sports has been affirmed by the National Women’s Basketball Association that chose to make Portland the home of their next team. Portland’s Zidell Yard will be home to a new Major League Baseball team. And so much more. 

We are making progress. But this is not a mission-accomplished moment.  We need to stay the course.

Since being your Governor, people – including some of you here today – have told me that I picked a tough set of issues to stake my name on. Housing and homelessness, behavioral health, and education do not lend themselves to quick results or winning popularity contests. What they do lend themselves to, however, is long term economic prosperity. 

I think leadership is about taking on big challenges. And such challenges, by their very nature, cannot be solved overnight. Real progress requires persistence. We can do hard things, and we can do them even better, faster and bigger when we work as a team. I am calling on everyone – especially the business leaders in this room today – to join me in being an ambassador for Portland and our entire state to recruit new business, deepen the footprint of our existing businesses, and bring the talent that we need to stay competitive. How we talk about this community matters, and it’s on all of us to tell Portland’s comeback story. 

So many things attract people and businesses to Portland, and to Oregon. 

From the natural beauty of our state, an affinity for innovation and drawing outside the lines, and an arts and culture community that punches far above its weight especially in my personal favorite category: food! Earlier this year, the First Lady and I joined restaurateurs and culture makers at Bon Appétit Magazine’s Best New Restaurants celebration, hosted at Portland’s own Kann. And, I cannot wait for the James Beard Public Market to open next year. 

Celebrations and landmark businesses like this spring up here because this place is special, and it’s worth fighting for. As we grow and evolve, we have an absolute imperative to ensure access to affordable housing, expand the availability of mental health and addiction services and strengthen our local schools. 

As Governor, I am holding up my end of the deal and working every single day to solve these issues because they are inextricably linked to our economic prosperity and the overall success of our state – including Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes who I visited this year to inform my approach to being a governor for the whole state. Now, for this next part, I hope the legislators that presented this morning are still with us in the room, because I am about to make the case for my budget. [LOOK AROUND ROOM]. 

Last Monday, after months of work from state agencies and my incredible staff, I released my 2025-2027 recommended budget.  It is a direct reflection of my commitment to strengthen Oregon, and Portland’s national position as a smart place to open a business and a wonderful place to live. 

My first budget as your Governor, published within just three weeks on the job last year, was titled “Mission Focused.” Now, I am here to argue that being mission focused in the form of executive actions, budget choices, and policy decisions since the start of my administration has shown concrete results and that we must stay the course on what we see working. That’s why this year my budget is titled “Building on Progress.” 

By the end of the current biennium, next July, the actions related to the homelessness emergency I declared are projected to rehouse and shelter thousands of Oregonians, while preventing thousands more from becoming homeless in the first place. If we continue at this pace, the equivalent of nearly 1 in 3 Oregonians experiencing homelessness on my first day in office will be rehoused by the end of my first term.

 

My 2025-2027 budget stands firm in addressing our homelessness and housing crises concurrently. Continued investments in shelter, rehousing and prevention, as well as funding to build additional affordable homes, cutting red tape so housing projects can break ground faster, and support for first-time homebuyers are imperative to our steady progress. That’s building on progress.

Let’s now turn to behavioral health.

 

We know that that in order to ensure that Oregonians have access to the health care they need across our state, we need to deploy a strategy where increased treatment capacity – that’s more treatment beds, more facilities, open more hours of the day – works in tandem with increased workforce capacity – that’s the number of qualified workforce to staff treatment beds, facilities, and fill shifts at all hours of the day. Just like we cannot solve homelessness without building housing, we cannot close our gaps in services without more places to get treatment and more people to provide that treatment.

   

And let’s turn our attention to our children and youth.

For our youngest Oregonians, my education initiative has retooled the way school districts teach our students how to read through incentivizing evidence-based practices, updated Current Service Level funding for the State School Fund to make the state a more predictable funder of school districts, lessened disruption to learning through summer learning investments, and more. To reap the benefits of this progress, we need to stay the course and build on our commitment to public education.

And with my deepened commitment to education funding, comes the need to improve our educational outcomes. I am not satisfied with where we are. My full legislative agenda will be finalized in the new year, but today I am excited to forecast one core component that me and my team will be focused on in the new year. 

My budget significantly increases state resources in our public education system. And along with this push for additional public education funding, we must also take action to maximize the outcomes with the funding that we have right now.

That is why I will work with ODE Director Dr. Charlene Williams and education partners this coming year on a set of concrete actions that inform an accountability action plan that better connects state funding to educational outcomes. 

We need more funding for our public education system – and Oregonians deserve greater transparency and accountability for how taxpayer dollars are advancing student outcomes.

Folks, my vision for Oregon is simple: 

An Oregon where no one has to sleep outside.

An Oregon where healthcare is there when you need it.

An Oregon where the promise of every child is realized.

Since my first day in office as your Governor, I have focused on taking urgent action on issues of top concern for Oregonians. My 2025–2027 recommended budget is a direct reflection of my continued and steadfast commitment to making progress on Oregonians’ priorities.

 

As Governor, I will always listen to Oregonians first and work to ensure my policy and budget decisions reflect an Oregon that welcomes everyone and is accountable to our shared values. All of you are an essential part of that equation. I rely on you to come to me with your challenges and with your successes. I rely on your feedback, your knowledge of what’s happening on the ground, and ultimately, your partnership in our shared work towards the Oregon I know is possible. Thank you.