Elana Pirtle-Guiney — Candidate for City Council, District 2
Candidate statement:
City Council must make decisions that build the Portland we want to live in 10, 20, 40 years from now. We must ensure our work makes our community, and our economy, more equitable, more sustainable, and more resilient, and we must ask who benefits, and who is left out, of every decision we make. This lens to my work will help me ensure I am addressing injustices in our community, including beginning to undo the health and safety legacies of environmental injustice.
I am deeply concerned that we are not making decisions now to mitigate climate change as we live in a denser city. Dense cities have less “private green space” like back yards. To ensure we don’t develop more neighborhood heat islands, continue to capture carbon emissions, and maintain open space for human livability and other biodiversity, we must invest in public green space, including buying land for small community parks, maintaining our tree canopy by building more greenways and wider curb strips where there’s room, and making fewer exceptions to sustainability requirements in our permitting.
Mitigation is critical, but not enough. We must also do our part to address climate change including making investments that make it easier and safer for people to bike, walk, and take transit, and working with our utilities to invest in a street-side electric vehicle charging infrastructure in neighborhoods where dense housing lacks driveways and garages. I’ll continue to point out that it is nearly impossible to take advantage of multi-modal and last mile connections with young children. I am interested in beginning a conversation with Trimet about creative solutions to make multi-modal transit more accessible to families.
And we also must be a player in the work to address resilience risks that affect our City – many of which disproportionately affect District 2. This includes mitigating the risks from the CEI Hub and pushing the State to identify alternative sites for fuel storage (that do not merely “move the risk” to a community that is less ready to advocate for their safety) and ensuring all communities have exit routes in a natural disaster (at least three, and possibly five, N and NE neighborhoods will be stranded in an earthquake). It also includes making sure the superfund cleanup work in our river creates good jobs for our community, is complete enough that the river is no longer a health and safety risk, and restores habitat that is good for fish and mitigates flooding and future risk to our human communities.
And finally, I am convinced the Portland Clean Energy Fund is Portland’s greatest asset and provides our strongest competitive advantage. These dollars should only be used for projects that meet the goals voters intended the funding for. City Council should continue to work with community to ensure funding meets the community-investment goals of the program, and we should also consider opportunities to make larger investments in decarbonization and sustainability projects that create good jobs, training opportunities, and community investments, in the long run.
Will you ensure the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) remains climate-focused in line with what voters intended?
Yes
