PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - The City of Portland presented its final plan of how they want to allocate $750 million of the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund’s (PCEF) Climate Investment Plan on Thursday.
The 76-page Climate Investment Plan came about after voters approved an investment plan to help fight climate change in 2018, followed by months of community outreach and input. The money would go into seven different categories including renewable energy, transportation, green infrastructure, climate jobs, regenerative agriculture, climate justice, and other carbon-reducing projects.
Portland City Commissioner Carmen Rubio said the new Climate Investment Plan will help Portlanders adjust to extreme weather caused by climate change.
“This is why we have urgency in building as sustainable and climate-resilient city for future generations,” Rubio said. “Especially those who have been impacted first and disproportionately.”
Most of the money will go to community-based projects that retrofit apartments and commercial buildings to reduce emissions. Transportation initiatives will also receive funding such as investment in community-shared e-bikes.
Indi Namkoong is the Transportation Justice Coordinate for Verde, one of the nonprofits in Portland that helped get PCEF on the 2018 ballot. Her focus on the Climate Investment Plan was to help move money toward green transportation initiatives to help low-income neighborhoods.
“I think easy and affordable access to transportation that takes them to the places they need to go,” Namkoong said. “That could be a bus to the central city. That could be a faster more frequent service down 82nd Avenue. That could be more crosswalks or more sidewalks.”
She said it’s been a lot of work to get PCEF to this point but she’s happy to finally see her ballot initiative mere steps away from being a reality.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to shore up our strength where it already exists in the city where we already have programs that we can give this additional support and an additional lift too,” Namkoong said. “And it’s still creates this community grant program that really invests in those bright ideas.”
The city council will hear the first reading of the Climate Investment Plan on Sept. 20 and vote on it the following week. It will likely pass. Once it does, Portlanders will start seeing new climate change projects take shape.
In the next five years, Namkoong hopes to see more bike lanes, places for children to play without the fear of traffic, accessible pedestrian walkways and more options for affordable green transportation.
“When the community leads, we all win,” Namkoong said. “The diversity of knowledge, the ideas, the breadth and depth of investment this fund is capable of, it’s hard to overstate the benefits.”
