Candidate statement:
Environmental justice / Public health / Climate change / Climate resilience
Every policy we consider should be looked at through a lens of environmental justice and public health, whether identified as a trophy climate policy or otherwise. Our city council should be considering the long term climate impact of all of our choices, and embedding resiliency and sustainability in every decision we make.
Bicycles / Pedestrians (safety, walkability)
Safe multimodal infrastructure is crucial to expanding safe, accessible and sustainable transportation infrastructure. Too many children in Portland are still walking to school in the gravel along the side of a road. Too many cyclists are competing for road space with vehicular traffic. We need to expand safe active transit infrastructure, and do so with green infrastructure that centers shade equity and green spaces at the forefront.
Shade equity / Sustainability / Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF)
The PCEF tax has brought in a higher volume of funds targeted at climate resiliency and sustainability initiatives for underserved and marginalized communities. We should be upping the scale of the projects we’re tackling with those funds, serving a larger volume of communities and community members in investing in resilient homes and communities.
Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub / Oil by rail / Zenith Energy
Revoke the Zenith LUCS due to their illegal lobbying and their manipulation of their safety testing reports. Reconsider the prioritization of renewable, but still volatile, fuels at the CEI Hub. Partner with jurisdictions across the state to inform and lobby for diversification of storage locations for the fuel storage – ensuring jurisdictions across the state understand the danger posed to all of our communities by the instability of the land that the CEI Hub is situated on. Join the county in implementing risk-bonding as quickly as possible. Build a tax model on capacity volume, not usage volume, to incentivize the decommissioning of deteriorated tanks.
Electrification, energy transition / Emissions reduction / Transit
As part of our transit investment we need to break down the hub-and-spoke model of our public transit system. We need to make it easier to move across the city without having to go through the city center. The easier we make it for communities to use public transit to get where they’re going the more we will genuinely advance reducing reliance on vehicles. We should have a plan in place for transitioning to exclusively electric public transit. We should not assume that some people will exclusively drive and others will exclusive use multimodal transportation, but rather be working on creating a service network that allows people to make the choice to travel via active or public transportation without being significantly burdened by that choice.
Will you ensure the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) remains climate-focused in line with what voters intended?
Yes
