Council punts on $15 million PCEF question as new ideas emerge

Portland City Council has a difficult decision to make. With $15 million in revenue from the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund at play, a myriad of ideas on to spend it on have emerged.

At this morning’s meeting of the Climate, Resilience, and Land Use Committee, councilors punted on the decision in order to have more time to mull their options over.

As expected, the ‘Bikeable Portland’ plan, received a strong pitch at the meeting today. Testifying on its behalf were former U.S. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Portland Public Schools Board Member Stephanie Engelsman, and the plan’s architect — veteran Portland Bureau of Transportation Bicycle Coordinator Roger Geller.

Geller framed his proposal as something that would cost $6.3 million over three years for a relatively small targeted area (that could be larger with more funding). “This program centers on two ideas,” Geller explained. “Giving people a reason to bicycle and then opportunities to do so… the program is predicated on the idea that bicycling is a good product, that it’s transformative at both the personal and societal level.”

Engelsman, the school board member and an e-cargo biking mom, said she likes the program idea because, “It’s built on a concept of the fantastic bike bus idea that we’ve seen work in schools.” One element of the plan would be to purchase more bikes for school students to use and train P.E. teachers how to teach kids to ride. The plan would also build off the success of volunteer-run bike buses throughout Portland by contracting with an organization that would hire ride leaders who would host daily, regularly scheduled rides. “Bike busses work so well because there are dedicated leaders who understand the routes, who know how to troubleshoot on the way and help make it fun and stress-free to ride downtown.” Engelsman told councilors. She called Geller’s proposal, “A low-cost plan with a potential massive payoff across the city.”

This morning’s meeting was Geller’s first opportunity to explain his idea since it leaked to the community last week. In his testimony and presentation to council, Geller said that despite all the miles of Portland bikeways that have been built, ridership has gone down. “We’ve invested significantly, and we’re not seeing the results just from building the bikeway network.” That’s why Geller wants to turn to grassroots organizing and marketing, along with a few strategic capital investments in the target area.

Here’s more from Geller on those projects:

“The bikeway network in much of the target area is formed by neighborhood greenways, so we’re looking at improving conditions on those neighborhood greenways, building more diverters and also building bike lanes and improving bike lanes where they don’t exist — especially on a stretch of Burnside that connects inner Portland with East Portland.”

Central to Geller’s thinking is that the existing bike network has more capacity than is being used. “In 2016 the high bike use that we had was based on about 23,000 Portlanders biking daily,” Geller shared with councilors. “Tomorrow, 70,000 Portlanders could decide they wanted to bike, and the system could accommodate them.”

One challenge for Geller is that no one has ever presented a plan like this before, and many Portlanders say the only plan they want to hear about is one that is laser-focused on installing more protected bike lanes. Another challenge for Geller is that there are now many other folks interested in this pot of funding.

As I’ve reported, this funding is in play because the PCEF Committee recommended that, as part of its annual update process, their Climate Investment Plan (CIP) should reallocate $15 million from an electric vehicle purchasing program to a housing program.

But Councilor Steve Novick, who chairs the Climate, Resilience, and Land Use Committee, feels like how that $15 million is spent should be up to debate by council. So now it’s become sort of a feeding frenzy.

At this morning’s meeting Council received pitches from several different groups.

TriMet made a request for about $13 million. They want to put the funding toward restoring Line 19, upgrading MAX to withstand climate change-related impacts, and to invest in hydrogen bus infrastructure. PBOT Director Millicent Williams pitched a $15 million suite of projects including: help with upcoming Portland Streetcar cuts ($4.5 million), a zero emission delivery plan for the James Beard Public Market ($2.8 million), funding for the Broadway Main Street project that Trump killed last summer ($5 – 8 million), and transit passes for all PBOT employees ($1.5 million). Advocates from the Multnomah County Youth Commission asked for a major expansion of the TriMet youth transit pass program. The leader of the nonprofit Frog Ferry showed up (at the invite of Councilor Sameer Kanal, who’s a fan of the idea) to remind Councilors that it would take $22 million to get their first boat in the river.

And to make the decision even more difficult for council, the housing development manager from nonprofit Self Enhancement Inc — the nonprofit that would have received the additional $15 million as recommended by the PCEF Committee to install heat pumps in low-income housing units — showed up to warn everyone their projects could fail without the funding.

No decision was made today as the committee voted to send the PCEF CIP amendments forward to the full council without the changes to this specific $15 million.

Today we learned not only what other ideas are on the table for funding, but we also got a few hints about where councilors stand on them.

Councilor Candace Avalos was not happy the full CIP amendment was not approved today. She is the only councilor who wants to keep the PCEF Committee recommendation as-is and switch this $15 million from EV subsidies over to home energy retrofits.

One of the reasons Councilor Novick wants to have this debate is because he has long felt like PCEF was short-changing transportation — despite the fact that transportation is the number one source of climate emissions in our city.

Avalos tried to convince folks that that’s not the case. She sees the housing funds as an urgent need that would go toward a shovel-ready project. “This is not a permanent deprioritization of transportation,” she said. “What’s before us today is not a philosophical shift in our climate priorities… this is about timing and readiness and impact, not about abandoning transportation as a climate strategy.”

But Novick pushed back and replied that, “Right now we’re spending 47% of PCEF funds on the second largest source of carbon emissions — buildings — and 24% on the largest — transportation. So the proposal that came from PCEF would increase that imbalance.”

Councilor Angelita Morillo expressed opposition to using the funds to “backfill TriMet.” Morillo (and Avalos, who shares this sentiment) does not think it’s wise for the City of Portland to get into the business of bailing out TriMet. They believe the state legislature needs to step up and do that. “And because we simply don’t have the dollars to do that,” Morillo added.

As for the Bikeable Portland plan, Morillo wasn’t impressed. “I’m not sure that advertising or more political discussion about biking is the barrier. I don’t think people don’t bike because of a lack of advertising, I think that we’re not biking in the city because it doesn’t feel safe, or because we don’t have the physical, hardened infrastructure to keep people who are biking safe. And I struggle to see how the ride-along things are different than PedalPalooza or other things that already exist for free that people can join.”

And Councilor Sameer Kanal also had sharp opposition to some elements of the Bikeable Portland plan, saying, “I strongly oppose the use of money for social media ad campaigns at PBOT to encourage people to bike.” But he likes other aspects of the plan, like the community activations.

Both Kanal and Councilor Dan Ryan expressed they’d like more time to fully digest the options.

No announcement was made today about when this discussion will happen, but it’s like to be at a future meeting of this same committee. And keep in mind that councilors could vote to support an option that includes elements from several different plans. The $15 million is still in play and what it ends up funding is undecided.