Portland Funds Community-Led Clean Energy Projects — Episode 190 of Local Energy Rules

So I had always been really passionate about making sure we emphasize sustainability in our travel policies and our travel investments, but also expand on the parts of our climate experience that is often overlooked. And I’m really here to represent many priority communities, the Black, indigenous and people of color communities, mostly immigrant and brown communities where I come from, as well as people with disabilities as a disabled person. So all kinds of different intersections I’ve mentioned there really brought me to become a champion for PCEF and first and foremost from my communities and the communities that I’m part of.

The first cohort of committee members, our original five plus the four that we selected, have been charged with advising the city staff who have been running the show mostly and the bureau leadership as well. We’ve also helped define the guiding principles for the Portland Clean Energy Fund and made sure that PCEF was rooted in community in all the ways possible and to make sure that the city staff were in tune with community needs and that they were checking in with community leaders organizations and all of the priority populations who need to be centered in this work. So committee members were really part of helping them create the structure, but we were also limited in our own power too. As you know, a volunteer committee isn’t the same as having a full-time staff person. So we got to tune in on an average of five to 10 hours per week at the height of PCEF to make sure that things were being considered as they developed the program. On top of the guiding principles, we were actively scoring applications with the staff for that first round of funding and also the second round of funding and just making sure that all the criteria would be met by the applicants that they were centering the principles of PCEF and that they were a good fit for the funding source that we had available to us.

So we’ve done a lot of grant making duties as you could say, but we were also ambassadors for PCEF making sure that all corners of the community were hearing about it, knew how to take advantage of it and were more aligned with the program if they hadn’t been aware of it before. And now we are heading up this big effort of developing PCEF first climate investment plan, which we are aiming for city council adoption by the end of summer or early fall. And so developing this plan involved a lot of hands-on work from the committee to make sure we were talking to everyone in the community, that we were checking all of the different aspects of the plan and the contents of it and engaging with the public in all the ways that we could virtually and in person.

We had been observing them being overworked and spread thin. It was a small startup team who had to get a lot of money out the door through these different grant cycles and we noticed that staff really just didn’t have the capacity to do that work as well as manage all of the contracts that came with PCEF. You know, when you’re dealing with this much money, you have to manage a lot of paperwork that comes along with it. So while we weren’t hiring staff or vetting them, we were trying to champion them in as many ways as possible too with the city council. So we often echo the ways that we needed to grow the PCEF team, which at that time was limited by the code language, the original PCEF legislation that had passed limited the amount of staffing that PCEF could have because of the overhead costs and the cost to administer PCEF.

It was written in that they, they couldn’t exceed a certain amount but we knew immediately that PCEF had outgrown that. So we tried to champion with city council more staffing and more expansive ways to grow the program and to make sure it could be healthier moving forward. We did a lot of community engagement too. While we have an excellent community engagement team within the city, PCEF staff we’re, you know, an extension of community members as well as our committee. So we all championed community organizations and pockets of the community that maybe were often overlooked in other parts of city government. So we were actively bringing our identities to the space and also making negotiations in places that I think were necessary. Oftentimes championing certain causes and projects without obviously the conflicts of interest, but making sure that certain types of things were being elevated in the public meetings and echoing comments that we had heard from the community and reading through tons of email and feedback and making sure those things were making its way through all of the public forums that they might not have made them to.

You might have heard about cooling Portland. It’s our climate resilience program that came about because of our record heat waves that we’ve experienced in past summers and unfortunately those heat waves resulted in unprecedented deaths in the city, mostly from vulnerable populations and community members such as older adults and people who are much lower income who lived in older housing units. So we responded quickly with that project and it’s been a worthwhile investment. So June, 2021 and those events really spawned this program. We’ve also funded tons of projects that make sure that we have a stronger and healthy and more inclusive workforce. We center workforce and contractor training in a lot of our investment and make sure that we create cleaner jobs and jobs that are equitable and continue to bring wealth into communities that have never experienced that. So our workforce and contractor investments are some of our shining elements of the program, but also have so much more work to do.

We know that wages need to continue growing for those who do this clean energy work and we know that the internal laws and practices need to evolve as well and so much of PCEF can’t touch that either though. So we rely on the state and counties and other decision-making and legislative bodies to ensure that they too are evolving their workforce and contractor practices and laws. So that’s something to look out for. I think that’s a hot topic because of so many things evolving with labor at the national level and as well as at the state level. So we hope to continue being an example of good ways to grow workforce and contractor development and make sure that younger generations can also take advantage of the different programs available to them so that they can see successful pathways into clean energy right away.

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And it is a plan that’s developed by the people. It’s obviously gonna bring in the brilliance of community organizations who were with PCEF from the beginning. And it also brings along our best knowledge from technical experts, industry experts, and other community members who are also part of PCEF, even if not from the beginning. They’re also part of this whole ride. So I’m proud of what we’ve come up with. We’ve got our latest draft on our website and by the time folks tune into this and hear out this episode, you would be able to see that draft and following along our next steps this summer for stewarding it to city council adoption. So please keep up with it. It’s, it’s a plan that doesn’t necessarily change the committee’s power or responsibilities, but it just creates a clearer guidebook for us to make our investments. So one of the distinguishing things about the CIP are different investment areas that we clearly spell out there.

One of the newest parts of it that I’m excited about, which hadn’t been present in PCEF previously, is our transportation decarbonization area. And I think a lot of champions in the community have been excited to see this emerge because they have been calling for more transportation investment in PCEF since the onset of it. But it hadn’t been part of the initial code and it wasn’t what the voters passed in the ballot in 2018. So that’s something to look out for. And initially there’s some things in there about e-bikes that people are excited about. There’s more in there to invest in other ways that we have been falling short in the city around transportation, short of, of course building massive capital projects. But I think PCEF here helps increase transit use among our most vulnerable population and helps them have more resources to use bus and light rail, scooters, e-bikes and our award-winning programs at the city now to make sure people have multimodal access to getting around where they need to go.

And so we need to look beyond the car, especially the personal car, as a solution and make sure that we are still investing in mass transit and ways that people who don’t drive can still get around affordably. I know because of sprawl and the conditions land use conditions that we have currently, the car seems really appealing to many neighborhoods outside of the urban core and that’s the default ways that people do get around. But we still need to make sure we are bolstering all of the other ways that people can get around without the car and make sure that we provide the resources to do that. So I’m excited about PCEF venturing into transportation decarbonization mostly because I think we need to listen to the solutions that people want. And I’ve been working exclusively with youth who are really carrying the burden of the climate crisis now.

And if you listen to them, you hear about all the solutions that they see would be viable for them in their generation and it’s not around the car. So I’m excited about making sure PCEF continues to serve young people that PCEF continues to include young people in the CIP. Fingers crossed we’ll get more participatory budgeting in there and more opportunities for people outside of the committee or outside of the bureau to champion solutions without having to apply for a competitive grant. So I, I think there’s so much room to make sure that young people can identify solutions in PCEF. We’re not there yet, but I will be that noisy committee member who will continue elevate young people and the climate crisis and climate leadership forevermore.

There’s just different ways to measure all of them. But we have heard the concerns of council and the ways that they want us to evaluate the program. We’ve listened to the community members who wanna see how the funds are being spent and what’s being spent so far so that that level of tracking is going to be available soon. But you can see on our website now just a little bit about each round of RFPs that we’ve released, but many of the projects have been so young and they’re still implementing them that we just can’t measure any of their outcomes just yet. But we hear you and we wanna make sure that all of this is viewable for everyone, especially those who want to implement some form of PCEF where they live as well. We know there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from PCEF and we can’t wait to publish those things.

I also wanna give a shout out to the researchers who have been talking with me at Portland State University who want to evaluate PCEF. There’s so much interest in the research community to really elevate all of the different lessons learned, but to see where in PCEF we can still improve. And I think there’s a lot of good research questions that are emerging there and I wanna make sure that I encourage researchers to step up and, and make sure they put their proposals in to evaluate PCEF. I think it’s, it’s a good time to be doing stuff like that.

I think a lot of the critics were pretty misinformed and I think there’s a lot more room for PCEF and community champions to keep telling the stories of PCEF and the ways that we are making an impact. For a while we didn’t have a huge comms capacity or communications capacity with PCEF, so we got behind in telling the stories, talking to the media. We didn’t get to elevate the strengths of the program and talk about the data that we could have been talking about. So I think now we are learning from that and making sure that people get to see all the great things that are happening on top of all the areas that we can improve. I also think that there’s so much work we could do to make sure that community is just as informed as well beyond the nonprofit organizations who are always in the loop.

There’s so much more community out there beyond those who are represented by nonprofits. So I wanna make sure that young people, older adults and people who are just not affiliated in any way continue to find themselves in PCEF, that they see a space for them to make an impact. They see a place for them to benefit. I think that’s something that we could just do better all around with any issue that we’re charged with, whether it’s climate justice or transportation, decarbonization and participatory budgeting and greening the community. I think there’s so much more we need to do to make sure everyone’s informed and we’re not just gatekeeping a lot of technical knowledge that serves us.

Some of the critique is always gonna be around your projects are not gonna reduce carbon enough. There’s obviously a lot of technical experts out there who have a better idea of how to run PCEF or other special interests who believe this is all fluff. So I think that’s something where we could use any kind of help where we have technical experts who can uplift the ways that installing solar panels or investing in community gardens or making sure we keep people in their housing would help reduce carbon emissions all around. So all those brilliant minds out there who are studying this or already working on it as experts talk about the data, talk about how these programs are effective and share these examples. There’s always gonna be naysayers who, who will say that PCEF not doing enough and we’re not doing it fast enough. And I know they mean it with the best intentions, but I, I think if they knew how some things were working on the inside, they’d realize like that our pace is a healthy pace and that we’re moving at the speed of trust as much as we can.

There’s also a lot of work we can do to make sure we’re vetting contractors better. I know we have some challenges around awarding contracts to contractors who weren’t formally or properly vetted. And that’s something that the city’s working on now to make sure that we’re doing all the background checks in a way that’s not creating more barriers and that we are properly vetting different contractors in a healthy timeline to make sure that we are investing our money in the right places. So there’s a lot of lessons learned, but they’re not part of our downfall at all. I think it just makes us better, makes us find more ways to create solutions and to create a process that’s more thoughtful and responsive to different people’s needs.

And I’m speaking to frontline community members. Those of you who are the children of immigrants or immigrants yourself, those of you who fight for farm workers and fight for reproductive justice, there is a space for you in clean energy and in climate justice. Trust me, I would’ve never imagined that. I don’t think you need all of the degrees to make an impact. You just really need to have your supportive networks. You need to have your values in place and you need to be aware of your voice and the power that you have with it. I wish someone would’ve told me early on what I could be doing with PCEF and gave me the encouragement I need to weather these past few years. I know it’s been tough for me and other committee members, but I just wanna thank anyone who’s doing this kind of public service.

Whether you’re an elected official who never quite, you know, found your allies, or you’re a community member contemplating a space on a committee or a board, please, you know, find your people. We’re out there. We need you and your leadership and your brilliant innovation that has yet to emerge and all of the things you know about your own life and your communities that you want to uplift, please take it on. And I would love to talk to anybody out there who is in the space now and who finds themself in a tough spot making the decision for and with communities. I wanna be there for anybody else who is in that space and I think there’s a whole network of us if it doesn’t exist, I’m sure someone’s creating it.