Steve Novick — Candidate for City Council, District 3
Incumbent CJ Score: 43.5%
Endorsed 350PDX CJ platform? No
Will you support PCEF? Yes
Candidate statement:
Effective Use of PCEF Dollars
Climate change isn’t just the greatest challenge of our time – it’s the greatest challenge in human history.
Portland must lead in reducing carbon emissions and reducing climate change harms for vulnerable communities. To address those needs, Portlanders voted to create the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF).
Thus far, PCEF has largely been spent on projects to improve energy efficiency in specific buildings, which is good, but affects a limited number of people. I want to have a discussion about whether it would be more effective and cost-effective for PCEF to make fewer, but bigger, investments that affect larger numbers of people.
One of the essential keys to reducing climate-changing emissions is to get people out of their cars and on to transit, bikes and feet. At the same time, the cost of owning and maintaining a car is a huge burden on all people, but especially low-income people. A recent poll that Councilor Kanal and Steve paid for, which surveyed 500 Portlanders in PCEF priority populations, found that given three choices for PCEF investments – generating clean energy, making houses more energy-efficient, and making buses more frequent and reliable – PCEF priority populations made the transit option their top choice. I want to have a vigorous discussion about whether in the next Climate Investment Plan, PCEF should work with TriMet to invest significant funds in improving service in areas of the city with a high concentration of PCEF priority populations.
I also want to explore using PCEF to address a major affordability issue – rising water rates. One of the drivers of rising rates is that the City is building a water filtration plant designed to ensure that the water system could survive a wildfire in Bull Run – an increasingly scary possibility – and subsequent water contamination. Climate change has dramatically increased the risk of severe wildfires; the filtration plant is largely a climate mitigation measure. And rising high water rates fall hard on PCEF priority populations. So I have initiated conversations about whether, in the next Climate Investment Plan, PCEF should help pay for the filtration plant.
Safe Streets to Encourage Biking and Walking
Encouraging people to bike and walk is good for the climate (among other benefits). But we need to make biking and walking safe. One important strategy is traffic law enforcement, specifically with red light and speed cameras, which are proven to be effective. Arguably, driver behavior got worse during the pandemic and has not improved. New York City has ⅓ the traffic fatalities per capita as Portland. There are a variety of reasons why – but one important factor is that they have 3,000 speed and red light cameras, and we have about 30, even though Portland has 1/3 of the lane miles as New York City. I will take every opportunity to spur and assist PBOT to add more cameras.
