Budget negotiations are well underway in Portland City Hall—although, by most accounts, with less intrigue and cloak-and-dagger than in previous years. That's because Mayor Charlie Hales made a lot of people happy with his budget plan, announced April 30—cutting public safety bureaus to pay for safety net programs and front-end services like parks (except for Buckman Pool). That reveal came after he involved city commissioners in his work to an unprecedented degree. Thusly, for a lot of observers, there's not much to fundamentally quibble with.

But not much is not the same as nothing. Hales thought he'd deliver on campaign rhetoric—and please activists and business interests—by lowering planned increases in the city's water, sewers, and stormwater rates. The mayor did that partly by cutting money for needs like watershed management and then shifting the work from the Bureau of Environmental Services back to bureaus by the city's general fund.

That gesture, it turns out, has pleased few people. Water rate activists wonder why Hales didn't cut rates instead of reducing increases. And today, in city council, environmentalists accused the mayor of stripping away environmental work that brought United Nations' laurels to Portland earlier this year. (They echoed some of the concerns Commissioner Amanda Fritz raised when I spoke to her just hours after Hales unveiled his budget.)

"We believe this budget takes us back 25 years—both in substance and in philosophy," said Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, "back to the time when the city had a sewer agency and the the city didn't have an environmental agency."

Hales is shifting more than $2 million in programming from the city's Bureau of Environmental Services. BES also is no longer contributing to the on-the-chopping-block Office of Healthy Working Rivers. Not all of the shift is directly connected to promoting watershed health—a key means of filtering the filth and runoff that makes it into our sewers and then, eventually, the Willamette River. But much of it is. The Oregonian in detailing the shift last week offered an interesting breakdown.

The list is long: $125,000 for invasive species removal, $811,000 for tree plantings, $175,000 for a youth conservation group, $750,000 for street sweeping, $62,500 for elm tree protection, $81,000 for a tree inspector, $72,000 for a Forest Park ranger, $105,869 for stewardship of the Willamette River and $112,000 for environmental education and outreach.

Hales has defended the shift as "honest budgeting"—he thinks the Bureau of Transportation should take on more street cleaning. The parks bureaus should take on the Forest Park ranger. But it's less clear whether the parks bureau, which is taking on street tree planting and other Gray to Green infrastructure, is the best bureau for the job. And there are real cuts beyond the shifts.

Sallinger noted the demise of the city's ecoroof program, river-focused positions in the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, and rapid-response testing in the event of a calamity.

Mike Houck of the Urban Greenspaces Institute says he was concerned after he heard from the mayor's office that there's no plan in place to pick up that work.

"We're very concerned with the shift in philosophy that seems to be occurring," he said.

Houck said he was told the city would rather fund environmental work through bonds and levies.

"We all know how difficult it is to pass levies," he said. "We're out there competing with children's levies, parks levies, to fund environmental programs It makes absolutely no sense."

Sallinger said the environmental community understands the needs for cuts and would be willing to step up with outside funding to help do the work of changing and reshaping BES' environmental work. Sallinger suggested waiting year on watershed programs before deciding to "gut them and move them around randomly."

Both Houck and Sallinger worried the limbo, as they see it, in Hales' budget plan would amount to a "dismantling" of expertise that's made BES, as Sallinger put it, "the best urban environmental agency in the world."

"The environmental community is willing to step up," Sallinger said. "But not with proposed cuts on the table."

It's not terrible likely, however, that the outcry will persuade Hales to backtrack. After Sallinger and Houck spoke, a parade of rates activists and business reps wrung their hands about the crippling cost they're already enduring and accused Hales of breaking campaign promises even though the pushed a combined increase of 15 percent down to less than 5 percent.

Hales also submitted an op-ed to the O last week touting the reduced rate increase—seemingly drawing a big fat line in the sand and daring city commissioners to round up three votes to cross it and endure, as a result, the ire of motivated activists.

Walking out of council, Hales privately offered a revealing statement of protest to Commissioner Dan Saltzman: "We're not going back 25 years."