Portland City Councilor Mitch Green is worried our public transit system might be headed for a “doom loop” and he favors tapping into the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF) to prevent it. His comments at a meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this morning come just one week after TriMet proposed serious service cuts they say are necessary to grapple with a $300 million budget gap.
“In my view, the biggest threat to our climate goals is backsliding and losing ground on ridership,” Green said. “Which is a potential doom loop for transit.”
Green said making an investment into transit with PCEF dollars is something folks have been whispering about in private City Hall conversations, but now it’s time to bring it into the public. PCEF is a voter-approved fund administered by the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and made up of revenue collected from a 1% tax on the Portland sales of large retailers (companies that sell over $1 billion nationally and $500,000 locally).
Green was just spit-balling at this morning’s meeting, but he is clearly serious about the idea, which he described as, “Potentially approaching the climate investment plan (CIP, the plan that sets PCEF investment strategy) amendment process with a lens towards using some PCEF revenue to support TriMet through some sort of IGA [Inter-governmental Agreement].”
T & I Committee Chair Olivia Clark said she liked Green’s idea and wants to discuss it further at their next meeting.
T & I Committee Vice Chair Angelita Morillo said the topic of using PCEF funds for transit is already on the agenda for a meeting of council’s Climate, Resilience, and Land Use Committee scheduled for this Thursday, January 15th. The PCEF CIP adjustments on that agenda are part of a regular review process to make sure investments are set up for success and are in alignment with program goals. Separate from a larger investment in TriMet via an IGA as Councilor Green proposed, there’s currently a $15 million reduction to the CIP’s Targeted Electric Vehicle Financing Tools program that was slated to be spent instead on the Clean Energy in Regulated Multifamily Affordable Housing program. At least one councilor I talked to about that switch was uncomfortable that the funds were going from a transportation program to a housing program (given that transportation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions). Given Morillo’s comments today it seems there’s an opportunity here — given the severity of TriMet service cuts that have recently come to light — to keep this $15 million in transportation and put it toward bus service.
If a PCEF deal between Portland and TriMet was struck, it wouldn’t be the first time climate tax dollars funded transit. Back in December 2024, TriMet won $55.5 million from PCEF for their 82nd Avenue Transit project.
At this morning’s meeting, Councilor Morillo said the Climate Committee (which she co-chairs) will, “discuss different options for about $15 million in PCEF dollars that are available.” “Whether or not we should keep using them for housing infrastructure and making that more climate-friendly, or, what if we invested it on the bus? This is an open discussion.”
And since there’s often heartburn among climate advocates and politicians whenever PCEF funds get stretched into new places, Morillo added, “And as a transit user that desperately needs some of the bus lines that are getting cut, we need to balance the need to protect PCEF and its integrity and what it was meant for, and also look at some of these emerging issues given that the federal and state legislature abandoned us on public transit issues.”
That sense of urgency to fund transit is shared by Councilor Green.
“Once people switch away from riding a bus and they decide to get in that car, they’re never going to go back to riding a bus,” he said at the meeting today. “Or if they do, it’ll take pretty herculean effort to do so.”
— Learn more about Thursday’s Climate Committee meeting and view the PCEF CIP ordinance here.
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Not a huge surprise that after only a few years that PCEF has become the “go to” slush fund to raid. Might as well cut out the drama at this point and have the entire tax go into the general fund.
At least public transit service is pretty straightforwardly climate investment. Plus, the overhead should be low since TriMet already exists and provides the service. Lots of PCEF issues people have seem to boil down to “this grant money is being spent on nothing”, and it’s hard to argue a bus still going down NE Glisan is nothing.
TriMet service does not help with energy transition or related job training. Maybe helping TriMet buy electric buses at a faster rate than they would otherwise might be something, but just backfilling TriMet’s operating budget is not what we voted for.
Of course, Greene is free to go back to voters and ask if they want to expand the types of programs these dollars are spent on. If voters approve, then sure, go for it.
Yep, funding mode shifts from automobiles to transit is a perfectly valid way to use PCEF, in my mind. The thing that I do worry about is Trimet becoming more or less dependent on PCEF funding, hobbling PCEF’s ability to fund other needed mitigation efforts. But I’m 100% on board with an emergency infusion of funds, at least. The hard part comes next where Portland, Trimet, the three counties, various other cities, and the state figure out how to stabilize Trimet and hopefully wean it back off of the PCEF funding. The legislative session is coming up, and a transportation omnibus is back on the table, so my eyes are on what happens in Salem.
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This is a correct and appropriate use of the funds. If we didn’t have a bus service, it would be the exact kind of thing those funds might be used to pay for.
My only concern is if it becomes permanent – if they fill this gap, and then there is no urgency to fill that funding gap. Transit funding is something we allegedly pay for already, but we failed to raise the appropriate taxes to keep paying for it. We need to fix that separately.
Completely agree with you with one caveat. The buses were a great idea for PCEF before the budget collapse became apparent. Now it’s clearly as you said using the PCEF funds only to fill the gap.
How long before the council uses the funds for items that can only be vaguely connected to climate resistance/preparation?
“How long before the council uses the funds for items that can only be vaguely connected to climate resistance/preparation?”
You mean like street sweepers?
Except that robbing one budget strong to drop funds into another is a slippery slope to general fiscal mismanagement. What happens when this becomes the primary solution to ALL the city’s money problems?
I like the idea. What could be better for the climate than taking SOVs (and SUVs) off the road? Cars and trucks account for ~45% of GHG emissions, which is the largest contributor. Start by addressing the sector with the greatest impact.
I’d like a PCEF check to buy an electric vehicle.
I would like to see some analysis about just how many SUVs would be taken off the road by PCEF spending its money this way rather than just assuming it will be an effective tactic to reduce GHG emissions.
I’d rather spend the money where it will have the greatest impact, which I highly doubt is TriMet operations.
I like the sentiment, but I don’t see how this takes SOV’s off the road. It will hopefully prevent more SOV’s form being added. Congestion pricing has been shown to take SOV’s off the road and could be used to fund transit.
“T & I Committee Chair Olivia Clark said she liked Smith’s idea and wants to discuss it further at their next meeting.” Did you mean Clark liked Green’s idea?
yep. fixed. thanks!
How far will $15 million from the PCEF go toward filling the TriMet budget hole?
About 1/20th based on current projections. But the City would be wise to have their funds only allocatable to city of Portland serving routes. By population, Portland is about 40% of the taxing district (they may account for more or less of that by payroll tax but I don’t know that off hand), so this $15M would account for about 1/6th of the budget hole that would affect Portland*.
*directly anyways. Everyone in the district suffers when cuts happen, since it makes it harder to travel to other places on transit.
Hmm. I’d rather it be spent on insfrastructure that improves transit, like nicer stops or transit signal priority. I think it would even be a better use of the money to buy TriMet a bunch of electric buses. I understand the want to stop the backslide on service cuts, but what about this time next year? Are we just going use our PCEF slush fund in perpetuity to fund TriMet or is there a plan for a more durable funding source; aka raise the (currently TINY) payroll tax or develop and rent out some of the asphalt currently surrounding light rail stops.
It would be great if TriMet had a low-capital cost plan to improve service across the board while reducing operational costs. Something like a stop consolidation/bus lane/fare payment machine/signal priority plan could do 50% of the good of like a full FX build out for 10% of the cost. But to my knowledge, they don’t.
Stuff like TOD takes a lot more time, and has a harder to guarantee impact on the bottom line. But they do have a TOD team for what it’s worth.
Sounds good to me, but we should really redirect the endless money supply that we are sending to the county.
And don’t tell me it can’t be done…that thee is some rules against it. Rules, precedents, and laws don’t matter anymore in government.
The right wing would make it happen in a second if they had the majority and if supporting transit aligned with their goals.
Does $15 million really do much? Trimet says they have a $300 million gap
That is just one piece of this process. That’s a potential piece of funding that that specific committee is debating. What counselor Green is talking about would be totally separate and could be more potentially. It’s all early days in discussing this.
It’s very nice and generous for the City of Portland to offer to subsidize transit service in Forest Grove and West Linn, but what happens when the city inevitably removes that subsidy to fund some pet project? Will Trimet be able operate afterwards? And will the other jurisdictions be inclined to match the funding? Or worse yet, reduce even further their share of the funding?
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) tries its best to make sure that each publicly-subsidized transit system has stable funding, including at the 3-county state-run Trimet, so that federal and state subsidies are most effective. There’s no guarantee that Trimet will accept the offer of extra funding from Portland, or even that they’ll be allowed to.
In Seattle, the transit levy is only allocated to Seattle routes. It would be easy to do this for TriMet.
There is absolutely no way the FTA would prevent TriMet from taking city funds. They want stable funding, but there are urban transit systems that are just part of general fund allocated city transportation departments (Madison, WI baby!). They do not systematically require all funding come from specific, permanent sources.
Do we have a sense how big the hole we’re trying to fill is?
$300 million – https://news.trimet.org/2026/01/trimet-service-is-changing-later-this-year-we-are-asking-riders-to-weigh-in-on-our-proposals-now/?_thumbnail_id=20208
Under no circumstances should a tax on Portland residents (who pay the PCEF tax via increased goods prices) be used to fund a Metro function which covers service in more than just Portland. Hard no.
I support this 1000%. I applaud Mitch Green for taking the initiative here and encourage anyone who supports it to testify on Thursday at the committee meeting!
I think for a more permanent and broader solution there needs to be a PCEF like tax at the state level. Part of the reason why Republicans got the upper hand on the transportation bill was that it is a regressive tax.