Our Agenda

When we create affordable housing programs and financial support services, there are many households in the middle-income bracket who are left to fend for themselves.  In today’s economy, this includes single-parent families, teachers, librarians, grocery clerks, carpenters, and many other hard-working Portlanders who are struggling to make ends meet.  Portland depends on those who get up every day to earn an honest day’s pay and the City owes it to the working class to ensure they have places to live, work, and play that are accessible to them.  Here’s how Ozzie will bring livability and relief to our hardest working Portlanders:

• Contract with community organizations to provide economic literacy programs, childcare, family counseling, and preventative social services for working households and people at risk of homelessness.
• Expand Career & Technical Education (CTE) programs into middle school and partner with industry leaders to provide classroom experiences to students.
• Fund pre-apprentice and apprenticeship programs with industry partners to create pipelines for construction, mechanics, robotics, computer systems, manufacturing, and craft industry careers.
• Fund technical assistance programs for re-training workers in at-risk careers for new jobs in emerging industries.
• Adopt anti-displacement incentives for low and middle-income households to protect them from displacement due to housing costs.
• Improve the affordable housing programs by adopting a uniform application to be used across the entire city and include new provisions to prevent displacement and recognize applicants who work nearby.
• Protect prevailing wage jobs on all publicly funded projects.

Our regional economy is built upon the small and medium size business community that call Portland home. We are fortunate to have a robust local business community that spans multiple industries and who serve the regional and global marketplace with local jobs that feed local households. As a small business Owner and long-time mentor to local small businesses himself, Ozzie understands the challenges of running a business and will make the City a better ally to businesses with the following measures: 

• Partner with local Chambers of Commerce to establish a “Portland Business” certification program and incentivize procurement of certified businesses on public contracts through hard goals.
• Create internal goals for agency procurement dollars to be spent directly on local and disadvantaged businesses. 
• Create an Office of Small Business inside of the City. This office would act as liaison to the local business community, oversee inclusion spend reporting, supervise the certified business support programs, and manage the City’s 1% for small business fund.
• Establish a municipal bank for the management of public and community investment funds, that are available to private customers.
• Establish a municipal broadband system available to all City residents and businesses with sponsored Wi-Fi services available to the public.
• Partner with local businesses to establish an “Adoption” program for neighborhood parks and sidewalks to improve cleanliness of our city while creating a tax deductible community investment fund.

As our City grows, we need to ensure every neighborhood has safe, well-lit, pleasant pathways for people to move about in a variety of ways.  We need to make sure there are maintained roadways to serve communities with passenger vehicles no matter what the next fuel source becomes.  Regardless of our pace and method of travel, we need to design this city for a multi-modal future.  We have a lot of work to do if we want a city of safe, multi-modal transit options and here is where Ozzie proposes to start:

• Safe Streets Initiative – host neighborhood level design competitions for improvements to unsafe intersections and corridors.  Support completion of viable proposals with neighborhood support.
• Visibility Enhancement Program – launch community supported program to improve visibility along roadways with tree trimming, signage, and lighting enhancement campaigns.
• Establish dedicated transit corridors for non-motorized modes of travel to promote non-motorized options and improve safety across all modes.

These are especially critical times for young families and children. Between the economic challenges of trying to get started in today’s economy to the unsettling concerns about the future of our planet, there is a lot to distract from the most important job parents have—to raise the best adults they can. I am the lucky father of two wonderful children who are quickly becoming adults and I know how much their future matters to us.  As Mayor, here is how I will help ensure our kids can get to school safely and play in Portland’s parks:

• Establish an “Adoption” program for neighborhood parks to improve the cleanliness and safety of playgrounds and surrounding areas.
• Facilitate Carpools and Bike Caravans to school with a city-wide system for coordinating with other parents to set up group travel.
• Partner with non-profits and faith groups to establish subsidized childcare and adultcare service programs through a centralized portal.

Portland has a legacy enjoying a robust creative community and has made a name for itself as a DIY hotspot.  Much of the livability Portland is known for can be attributed to the rich experiences given to us by our artistic community. Despite this legacy, our creative community is hurting. While visitation is down for downtown arts venues, several arts organizations in the industrial district and throughout the City have already been lost to displacement.  As a performing artist and someone personally saved by art, Ozzie has no problem seeing the value arts can play in our City and he has some ideas for how to improve the role government plays in supporting Portland’s artists & artisans:

• Commission socially relevant public art to elevate awareness on key issues and promote civic involvement.
• Formalize the arts affordability resolution passed by council that incentivizes development of creative spaces for artists and arts organizations.
• Staff the unfilled Arts Liaison position within the Bureau of Development Services and conduct a review of the arts organizations and creative spaces existing within the City. 

With 15% of our city’s adults over the age of 64 and that number climbing over the next 10 years, it is important that we find ways to engage our aging Portlanders in meaningful ways.  Many people are retiring and represent tremendous value to our community.  Many other people retired long ago and need some extra help around the house.  In both cases, Ozzie understands that we need better systems for keeping seniors engaged in the community.  Here is how he proposes to engage retired people and elders in need:

• Establish a community volunteering program that pairs teenagers and retired volunteers with seniors in need for support with daily activities like reading, lawnmowing, shopping, mail delivery, gutter/porch cleaning, and trips.
• Commission artists to curate stories of local seniors and hold local events commemorating Portlanders as part of a socially relevant art initiative to raise money for the volunteer program.

The differently abled community represents a diverse set of people with a diverse set of skills who is not entirely one group.  Across the spectrum of mental and physical abilities, there are many ways differently-abled people interact with the city. As an architect and advocate for universal access design, Ozzie knows that the best way to improve our built environment is by letting users show us where we went wrong. Here is how I am looking at improving access in our city by investing in universal design expertise:

• Commission facility accessibility audits to identify barriers to the blind, deaf, mobility impaired, and mentality frail beyond ADA standards in all City buildings. 
• Commission a digital accessibility review of websites and digital channels for usability limitations for differently abled users.
• Standardize interpretation services for all public meetings and captioning for all video publications by the City. 

For all the dialogue about policing, it is rare to hear from the police directly. Ozzie has taken the time to listen to the community, the police, learn from his own lived experience, and recognizes that behind every badge there is a human being. We have to talk about policing and we have to reinvent what it means. For community trust to be restored, a major shift needs to take place. Policing needs to be about helping the community stay safe and maintaining the peace in neighborhoods. The hiring challenges at the police bureau suggest we have no choice but to save the bureau by reinventing it. Here’s how I propose we go about it:

• Diversify the police presence by creating a horseback, bicycle, squad car, e-scooter, and pedestrian version of safety officers that patrol the City and coordinate across the different modes.
• Diversify the police by training local youth in summer programs and hiring them for part-time assignments in their neighborhoods
• Create a safety and peace preservation unit that responds to low-level calls involving non-violent crimes and safety complaints with trained professionals.
• Create a mental and family services unit (an expansion of the City First Responder Policy) that responds to non-medical emergencies involving non-violent crimes and domestic disputes with trained professionals.
• Review the policing contract to ensure no special protections are granted to people with badges that have not been granted to people without badges.

We need to deal with the imbalance we have created in the carbon cycle. We also need to address climate change where it has the biggest impacts. As Mayor, I will give you more than proclamations—I will give you a real, meaningful conversation with the added invitation to become part of the solution. This is why I am proposing the creation of a Zero Fossil Carbon Sourcing Plan—a new vision for how we will deal with carbon management. Our dependence on fossil carbon runs deep, so we have a lot of room to innovate our way into new industries as we explore:

• Atmospheric fossil carbon coming from our regional utility grid and industrial infrastructure
• Transportation-based fossil carbon products including vehicles, fuels, parts, and components
• Fossil carbon-based materials and products like single-use plastics, asphalt, and medical devices

When it comes to water in the NW, our challenges revolve around managing storm water and maintaining the quality of our waterways as we develop our cities. For this reason, I propose a set of City Planning Codes that enable the development of on-site and district scale storm water and sewer water management projects designed to offset demand on the overburdened public system. We already have examples of this in Portland and around the world, but the need for more of them means our City codes need to be expanded to address new conditions such as:

• Green infrastructure projects that also provide public amenities
• On-Site treatment of residential and commercial wastewater
• District wastewater systems operated by community associations
• Privately owned infiltration and storm water management systems

‘Waste’ is just a word we use to describe things we don’t know what to do with and we need to stop using. Our region was a national leader in recycling before that was common and now it’s time to be a leader once again!  This is why I am proposing a regional Zero Waste Initiative to address the growing impacts of sorting, transporting, and managing solid waste in the region. This is not only an opportunity to clean up our environmental footprint, but it is a chance to create new industries in our region and provide meaningful green economy jobs for the NW. Here is how I will put Portland at the center of leading our zero-waste future:

• Form a regional waste management coalition of government and private sector industrial partners to create a solid waste inventory
• Eliminate waste streams one at a time with a combination of restrictions, producer take-back programs, and investments in locally produced alternatives.
• Create regional infrastructure for sorting, processing, re-purposing, and production of closed-loop solutions to today’s waste streams.

How we eat and where it comes from has a major impact on climate change today. Transforming the food system to a sustainable model means looking at how we source the food we consume as well as wasting less of the food we produce. As an ecologist I understand that a sustainable food system is not one that tells people what to eat—it is one that provides the most environmentally and socially responsible version of it imaginable. As Mayor, I propose incentive programs for the following much needed solutions:

• Vertical Urban Farming Systems
• Rooftop Food Production & Beekeeping
• Food Waste Reduction Programs
• Food Production & Food Storage Training Programs
• Community Food Pantries

Green building is an industry I have not only worked in—I’ve helped shape it. From LEED, BREEAM, GreenGlobes, Estidama, WELL, LivingBuilding, PassiveHaus, NetZero, and ENVISION, I know that the future of green building lies is forming public/private partnerships around district scale solutions. We are past the time of asking “how much better than baseline” we want to build.  It is time we ask, “how much better than net zero?”. Here is how I propose Portland move the needle further on green buildings:

• Establish a Transit Oriented Development Overlay Zone to incentivize projects that reduce the need to travel long distances for services and induce the use of public transit.
• Conduct a building service inventory to identify areas of critical needs (such as low-income housing & food deserts) and set priority incentives for green building projects that address those needs.
• Priority permitting and development incentives for Net Zero projects.
• Provide governance services to citizen groups for community-driven district scale green infrastructure projects.
• Establish a Code Review Committee to propose amendments and inclusions to the municipal code so that barriers to green building are resolved in advance of projects.

The good (and bad) news is this:  there is a lot of work to do! In order for us to make the transition towards the global marketplace needed for us to survive, we need to recognize that what we are about to do is huge. We are talking about new industries, new degrees, new jobs, new patents, new companies, and new solutions. As your Mayor, I will do the following to make sure Portland and the surrounding region is set up for success in the jobs of the future:

• Support Career & Technical education programs that bring industry experts into the classrooms and students into the field.
• Contract with training agents, pre-apprenticeships, and career exploration program providers to expand the number of Portlanders entering the construction trades.
• Invest in skill development labs and programs designed to help train people that are unemployed, under-employed, and employed in vulnerable careers.

People aren’t the only species that live in Portland. Our non-human neighbors deserve to be considered in our City’s vision and our human livability is an extension of how livable we can make the city for the plants and other animals that exist here. Portland citizens have always cared for nature; now it is time to let nature care for Portland citizens back. Here are the ways I will help bring nature into a fuller expression within the City:

• Conduct an inventory of environmental services including open space, vegetation, carbon sinks, stormwater infiltration, urban lumber, edible landscaping, and sensitive ecological habitat to be used for establishing priorities for projects within the city.
• Establish a leasing program for green roof owners to provide access rights for secondary uses such as bees, bats, and bird habitat.
• Establish community plant and seeds banks for citizens to use for restoration projects
• Establish a city-wide habitat restoration program that takes the coordination off the hands of neighborhood groups and provides volunteer and paid day-labor opportunities for people.