You've been on pins and needles all afternoon, Blogtown, so here's what we know about the new $1 million homelessness initiative Mayor Charlie Hales unveiled today (along with City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, Multnomah County Commissioner Jules Bailey, police officials and social service providers):

It looks largely like he said it would: As I noted earlier, Hales allocated more than $1 million to an "intensive street engagement and clean-up initiative" in this year's budget, and laid out a bare bones description of what it would amount to.

That's all on the table. The mayor's pitching a pilot program that resembles an effort the city tried late last year with people sleeping under I-405. The city will spend $924,000 launching a small army of social service workers—from Cascadia Behavioral Health, the Urban League of Portland, and the Native American Rehabilitation Association (NARA)—at the people "who have the greatest barriers to housing," by which he means the people most likely to tell social service workers to screw off.

Hales and his various partners in this effort make the case these organizations are uniquely qualified to tackle this issue. They say the Urban League and NARA can marshall outreach workers more likely to identify with people with backgrounds and racial demographics that might make them distrustful of white people.

On top of all this, money's going to Central City Concern, which will be running "cleanup routes" five days a week, according to Hales' chief of staff, Josh Alpert.

All those resources are actually going to target a tiny fraction of Portland's homeless. The goal for the pilot project is that 50 "households" find housing—a minuscule number compared to the thousands of people sleeping on the street. I asked about that, and Hales launched into a defense you got the sense he'd prepared. "You might say 'Thats a pretty expensive effort, to focus almost $1 million of services on 50 households," Hales said, pivoting to the cleanup efforts under I-405 last year. "When we focused that effort onto some of the key individuals on the street, not only were those folks housed, the side effects of those folks having large encampments went away."

"It's expensive," Hales continued, "but not compared to the alternative."

There are some new twists. Hales is promising two new daytime storage sites where homeless people can leave their stuff—one under the Burnside Bridge, the other on the Central Eastside. The storage areas will have dumpsters, a large cargo box, and a sharps container for used needles—what the mayor calls "very basic humane services."

The sites have firm costs estimates ($50,000 overhead, $5,600 a month for operations) but the exact location remains in question—particularly the Central Eastside site. In fact, Hales office is already sparring with businesses and neighbors in that district over the proposed move of homeless rest area Right 2 Dream Too. It could be in for a similar fight in its ambitions for a storage area, but Hales correctly pointed out there's already plenty of homelessness in the district, and that a trash repository and storage area is "better than the status quo. We're going to keep moving by increments to a place where people have sanitation and habitation."

The mayor's got someone you can call about homelessness besides his office. As you well know, the Mercury's fond of tedium, and so periodically sifts through the transcribed voicemail messages left with the mayor's office. They are invariably full of people mortified by some encampment or another.

Now, in a stroke of maybe-genius, Hales has a better number for them to call. He's conceived a "one-point contact system" where "the public can report behavior-based issues associated with the houseless population." Basically, you'll be calling a guy in the city's Office of Management and Finance (OMF) who already pulls the strings on the city's campsite cleanup program.

Speaking of which, none of this alters current enforcement. Hales made that clear. Police will still sweep problem camps. City bureaus will still call in private contractors and inmates to clear out rubbish, and nothing about this new pilot even reaches the problematic sites near the Springwater Corridor multi-use path.

Hales made a point of saying multiple times that "sleeping is not a crime," without touching the fact that, under city law, camping and erecting structures in order to sleep is a crime, and the city's been known to arrest people for it. (City staffers frequently draw a distinction between "entrenched" or problematic camps and more "low impact" sites when talking about which campers are ticketed.)

Veterans are taken care of, officials say.

This may not last. The $1 million the mayor allocated to this project was one-time money, and Hales was clear today that it's a "pilot project." No guarantee it's going to continue beyond this fiscal year (ending in June).

Hales is dusting off his stump speech. He took a couple moments before broaching the main point this afternoon to tick off a list you're likely to hear a lot of as May approaches. He said there are things that keep him up at night, but they're not opportunity in the city (new jobs!), or the budget ($49 million surplus this year, much of it not directly attributable to city officials!), or police use of force (it's way down, he says!). "Those things don't keep me up, anymore," Hales said today. "Homelessness does."

It was a savvy and brief digression, at a time Hales is clearly focusing on the political landscape in next year's mayoral primary. As first reported by the Oregonian today, the mayor had coffee with State Treasurer Ted Wheeler this morning. Wheeler's looking at a run at the mayor's seat, and polling indicates the former Multnomah County chair could be a strong challenger.

"We talked about all kinds of things including politics," said Hales, who wasn't giving up any easy information about the meeting. I asked if he asked Wheeler to coffee because of his potential political ambitions, and Hales said yes, though he said he didn't learn Wheeler's intentions. "It was a very friendly conversation."