The city of Portland has run out of funds from the Oregon Department of Transportation meant for cleaning up homeless camps and graffiti along freeways and highways. The funds were mean to last until July 1.

“We are responsible for litter collection, graffiti abatement, problematic camp removal on ODOT rights-of-way inside the city of Portland. In exchange, the state agrees to pay for those services," said Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler.

KATU caught up with Wheeler after the morning session of Wednesday's Portland City Council meeting.

He's summarizing the intergovernmental agreement (IGA) the city made with ODOT back in 2019, which stipulates that the city cleans up property and trash from homeless camps on ODOT property, and ODOT pays the city no more than $2 million for those services each fiscal year.

According to ODOT, the two parties renewed the agreement for another year in January.

"It’s worked really well up until this point," Wheeler said.

That is until the city burned through their ODOT funds four months early.

ODOT spokesperson Don Hamilton told us in a statement: "The City of Portland is responsible for managing those funds over the course of the year to provide a consistent level of service. Although the City has been working hard to put better tracking tools in place to manage their spending on clean-ups in the future, as of February they already spent the full $2 million for the budget period ending June 30, 2023."

We asked the mayor why the city didn't budget that money better. He says $2 million per year is not enough to keep those areas clean and safe.

"The bottom line is we didn’t know how much we would need and so the amount of money that came to us from the state was very much a guesstimate, and we realized we needed more personnel, more graffiti abatement, more litter collection. There were more problematic camps popping up than we anticipated. So the burn rate was higher than we guessed," Wheeler said.

We asked if this meant they were pausing the ODOT property cleanups, and he confirmed that.

"Well, it nearly kills me to pause the work. It has temporarily been paused while we figure out a solution. So I want to continue the work, because if you fall behind, it makes it twice as difficult to catch up again. We certainly saw that in the early stages of these cleanups. So we’re looking for alternative sources that might be able to fill the gap until the governor can come through with some additional strategic reserve dollars that she has access to or potentially other sources. In the meanwhile, we’re scrambling,” Wheeler said.

Hamilton says that ODOT is "currently in the process of reducing spending to address declining gas tax revenues." So he says the department can't spare any more gas tax funding to go toward this effort past the $2 million they've already given.

But he did add that the IGA allows the city to continue the cleanups on their own dime if they chose to.

Wheeler says he spoke with Gov. Tina Kotek on Tuesday about this and asked for additional ODOT funding to continue the cleanups.

"So I’ve asked the governor for an additional million dollars to keep the program moving through the end of this fiscal year, which is until July 1st. I’ve also requested of the governor that she double the budget for next year, and that sounds dramatic, but it’s really only a request for $4 million for a two-year period,” Wheeler said.