Carmen: Everyone deserves to feel safe in our city, and no matter where you live or what language you speak or who you love, being safe and public safety is one of the most basic city services that we can provide for our residents. And the data shows actually that crime is going down and trending downward, but people still don’t feel safe, and so we need to close that gap. And our city has really changed a lot over the last decade, and so we really need to revisit what that notion of public safety means and expand it. And that, for me, means having the right responders in every role. And for me, another big part of that answer is bringing back community policing into the way our officers do their work in our in the City of Portland, we used to do it, and we used to do it very well, and we all know that when people feel connection, when neighbors know officers and officers know business people, that sense of community and activation safety goes up, connection goes up, and crime goes down, and so we really need to bring that back into Portland. It also means hiring more officers who reflect the Portland of today and are trained in Portland values. And I’ll be the first on stage to say that Chief day has released his plan for getting 1000 new officers in two years or so, and I trust him to get that job done. And also 911 response calls need to go down as well, because you should never be kept waiting on one of the worst days of your life. But also new parts of our system, like Portland Street response, detox and deflection and responding to those in need.

Keith: We have to reduce the burden on our overloaded public safety system. In the last question I explained the delay in their response times. We know that 50% of their arrests are of the unsheltered I went out with the neighborhood response teams about eight months ago, we arrested a gentleman. He was addicted fentanyl, living in a camper, and he had been arrested nine times in three months. This is impacting your safety. So we brought that man back into the station, went through the process, and he walked out two hours later. Did we really help that person? And did we help you? We’re in this cycle of doing the same thing over and over again. We’re criminalizing him, giving him another citation he owes 1000s, 10s of 1000s of dollars, instead of providing a shelter, a safe shelter, like most cities in America does, except for a few cities on the West Coast. And because of that, now, Chief day closed our property crime division three weeks ago, four weeks ago. We all read about it. His terrible choice was, does he remove P. Officers on the domestic crime, child welfare side of it, or does he reduce property crime division? What a horrible choice that our chief has to make because he’s under staffed. And now Portland, the arrest rate for property crime is 5% it is Open Season in Portland. We’ve got to do something different. We are shoulder to shoulder with Oakland and St Louis.

Rene: In terms of restoring trust, I think Portlanders are demanding a proactive, assertive and present Police Department. We once had over 1000 police officers in the City of Portland. At that time, Portland was one of the safest cities in America. We can get back to the 1000 I support chief day’s plan to get there, and it’s essential, but it’s interesting in walking through East Portland, how consistent the messaging is about policing, whether you’re in the Chinese community, the Latino community, the black community, we want to see more police officers. We want them to be responsive. We want them to show up on those terrible days when we need help. And so I think committing to recruiting, which we’re having some success, is part of the equation. We also have to look at retention. That is going to be our single biggest challenge in the coming years. We are increasing the pipeline of police officers in the Portland Police Department, but they’re still retiring too quickly, so we have to create an environment that is welcoming and supportive of police. Last but not least, I would really encourage folks to pay attention to the new classes in Portland police. They are becoming more diverse, they are becoming more representative of our community, and again, I think continuing down that path is going to be an essential part of restoring trust.

Mingus: I’ll tell you, folks, police accountability is something which is important to me. I literally have skin in this game. And as the father of two teenage boys, I have kin in this game. I very much need the police service to treat people who look like me and my kids fairly at the same time, when I need to dial 911, and I need the cop to show up, I really need a cop to show up. And frankly, during my time and council, I’ve had to help call the cops a couple of times. There are a couple of things we can do for police accountability to make this true. Number one, we can stand up a Police Accountability Commission. I’ll tell you, I have been working on that steadfastly for my entire time on council. We will have a Police Accountability Commission stood up. This is a citizens group that will oversee the Police Bureau, or at least their actions during my first term as mayor. I will also tell you, this is something which is brand new. During my time on council, I fought to make sure that there were body cameras on the shoulders of every cop in this town, and today we have that. I’m incredibly proud of that success. I think modernizing our police bureau is incredibly important. In other words, it’s important for us to send the right resources for the right problem. So I support Portland Street response, for example, I will underscore one of the things that I heard Commissioner Gonzalez say, folks, if you haven’t taken a look at our police department lately, you should; the folks who are coming in are diverse. They’re young. They’re here in Portland because they want to engage in 21st century policing.

Liv: I want to reiterate that the question was about rebuilding the trust, the contract between the Portland Police and the citizens that they serve. Unfortunately, we’re still under federal oversight because they have a historical mistreatment of our mentally ill. So that’s a serious problem, and this police oversight bureau that Mingus spoke of, they have been working hard since 2020, 1000s of volunteer hours, and made a 300 plus page document of recommendations, very sincere, hard work, and the current Council just eviscerated it. So it is hard to rebuild trust when so many people are ready to forgive, are ready to have a detente. Yes, we all deserve to feel safe. And East Portland, North Portland, those communities especially, are wanting more and better policing, and a lot of the police are dealing with stuff downtown. Portland Street Response is a great model to take some of the heat off our police, and CHAT, the fire department program. To fund those to make sure that our policing, our armed officers, are dealing with those more serious crimes. Over my 28 years here, I have had my trust rebuilt in the police department. I had a really hard time my first 10 years here. I didn’t want to call the cops even when I saw. Like an old lady suffering on the side of the road. I was scared, but I have seen them improve. It’s possible.

Keith: I am not going to vote for a second person. How’s that? I’m abstaining.

Rene: Mingus

Mingus: Rene

Liv: Carmen. The future is female.

Carmen: Liv

Liv: I see a downtown filled with artists. I see these vacant zombie buildings. My campaign is calling them rehabbed with art studios and music spaces and low income housing. Other cities have found ways to convert buildings like this into housing. Portland has yet to do one of them. Humans thrive in density, like bees. Look at all of these downtown places, just waiting for vitality and creativity. I am an artist. I am so tired of seeing my artists friends get pushed out and move to Spokane or Virginia. It’s hard to keep the band together when the bass player is in Boise. Downtown will have artist spaces like Soho or the Pearl District. Very soon, there will be coffee shops and daycares and lunch places, and we will have the economic engine of the arts that we remember from the early aughts, bringing people from around the world to beautiful Portland.

Carmen: We absolutely need a new vision and to reimagine our downtown, and I believe we can become that world class city that we were on our way to be before covid hit. And also, I just want to say I feel very encouraged, because I don’t know if you’ve been downtown lately, but I spend a lot of time downtown during the week and on the weekends, and it is definitely vibing lately, and we have such a thriving arts and cultural scene right now. And earlier this summer, the Foo Fighters in Green Day were here. I don’t know if you remember that, but it brought in 25,000 people, and two thirds of those attendees were from out of town, so that’s good for tourism. That’s good for Portland. So I feel like we need to continue with that winning formula by making sure that we revitalize in the short term and also invest in the future. And our winning formula is building and converting more housing in our downtown core. That’s a huge opportunity for us that helps us with our housing goal and also helps us bring back people, residential life, community life, social life, activation into our downtown, also increasing our presence of safety and also doubling down on our support for small and medium sized businesses. They have been through thick and thin, and we also are 61% small businesses in our local economy. We need to act like that as a city and then also meaningfully invest in the arts and culture sector. It’s critical to our identity, and it’s something that’s organically grown, but we need to take it seriously for the huge economic contribution that it is.

Keith: The solution isn’t complex. If we end unsheltered homelessness, restore cleanliness and safety, we’ll welcome an influx of jobs and investment back to Portland. You know, I like what Carmen was talking about, and leave as well. But let’s talk about the urban core, about making it vibrant, add back restaurants, create that transportation oriented village that we’re focused on. We have an Office of residentials that are just sitting there ready to be converted. We have a $3 million credit. It’s only to be used if you do an earthquake upgrade. But what if you. A class a building that’s sitting there empty or near empty, but it has already been upgraded. We need to be more nimble. We need to be more quick with our credits. We need to bucket that money. And if somebody has a 12,000 a 14,000 square foot building that they want to convert, and we provide a credit for it, we need to allow that building to earn that income to get our developers developing instead of standing in their way. So Lee was talking about, there are cities out there that are focused on this. They will create a permit for an office to residential conversion in two months. There are cities out there that have converted 1200 units in two years. Portland hasn’t converted even one. We need to restore our downtown core and recognize it’s going to change. We’re not going to get all the downtown offices and the workers that we once had. So let’s change our core and create a new vibrant city for the future, instead of one that’s built on the past.

Rene: We need to revolutionize Prosper Portland. This is the economic development of the city of Portland. It once built big projects in the City of Portland with incredible success, the pearl, the South Waterfront, so much, so much of our city was driven by its predecessor. We it’s become a social engineering organization, and it needs to be redeployed, refocused on big projects with multiplying effect. When you’re talking about the urban core, that includes the future performing arts, whether it’s at the Keller or further up the pathway there, it also includes the Broadway corridor. It very well may mean baseball on the South Waterfront. What that can do for our downtown. These large projects have a multiplying effect economically, including for your downtown city. I also want to talk about tenure. You know, the telegraph just covered the City of Portland for the first time in a long time. They talked about my run for mayor. They talk about Nate Vasquez getting elected as dA and it was actually changing their advice to people wanting to visit Portland. They were saying, “Go to Portland again. I was there two years ago, a much worse place.” So when we take a stand on safety and beauty and a clean downtown, it matters. It actually attracts people back in. Also your city leadership needs to be in the office. Every day I’ve required that of my team. It helps build critical mass downtown, and it’s essential to set that the city government leads the private sector on bringing people back down.

Mingus: It’s no secret why downtown is struggling right now. Folks are afraid because in recent years, downtown has been dangerous. It’s been dirty. It’s much better than folks, thank it. It is so if you haven’t been in the downtown area recently, I encourage you to come down. But if we’re going to revitalize downtown, we have to take the basics seriously. Livability, safety are key. We got to clean up that graffiti. I’ll tell you one other important lesson from the pandemic. The neighborhoods that survived the pandemic most effectively have a richer mix of commercial and residential compared to what we currently have downtown. In other words, we need to have more folks living downtown. Other things that I think we can do, and I will lean into as your next mayor, is to create incentives for folks to sign these leases downtown, or to renew their leases downtown. I will also say that activation is incredibly important. Portland is starting to come back, as we’ve heard from Rene’s story. So our ability to support the arts, either through sports or theater, I think, is incredibly important. And I will tell you, one of the tools that I will use as your next mayor to help revitalize our downtown core is tax increment financing. I think there’s some real ability there to reimagine our city for the 21st century.

Mingus: As the former commissioner in charge of PBOT [Portland Bureau of Transportation], this is a space I know well. Here are a couple things every Oregonian and every Portlander needs to know: The systems that we use to fund our transportation system are fundamentally broken. It’s a sad truth. The funds that we use to fill potholes and to build bike lanes basically come from parking meter revenues and gas taxes. Our parking meter revenues are down because lots of people are working from home one or two days a week, and gas taxes are going down because cars are much more efficient. Frankly, this is one of the questions we’ll be dealing with in the next legislative session, and that’s also why it’s very important that you have a mayor who’s tuned into transportation issues. In the next year we need to work with our state legislature to develop a new system for funding our transportation system. Ultimately, I believe that’s going to be a vehicle miles traveled tax. I don’t think there’s a lot of controversy around that. There’s a lot of work that we need to do between here and there, and we need our state partners in order to implement that, but I think that’s the way forward. The other thing that we really need to continue to focus on is to build a multimodal transportation system so that you can get where you want to go, how you want to get there. As your commissioner in charge of PBOT, those are the values I brought to this work, and when I’m your mayor, those are also the values I’ll bring to leading the city.

Liv: So here’s the confluence of all my favorite ideas. I love public transit. I know that TriMet is Metro, but whenever I travel, I just have a fetish for public transportation. So I envision our TriMet being the biggest public art project on the West Coast. Let’s partner with our communities to connect them with TriMet. The Frog Ferry, I love that too… but partner with artists to make TriMet so vibrant, make it free. Everyone will ride if it’s free! The public safety aspect, it will be safer if it’s free and everyone rides and it’s a very wholesome place. It will be inspiring for our people suffering from addiction, even if they’ll be like, ‘Gosh, I want to get sober for that!’ And then PBOT needs help because not as many people are driving, there’s more cycling because not as many people are driving and it’s safer. That’s my vision. So please next mayor, whomever you may be, take it and run.

Carmen: I absolutely agree with Liv, I 100% support free transit. We need to really focus on multimodal transportation, because this is a new way, and climate change is here people, and we need to start acting like it. I also think that we can think about how we increase the greening of our public transit as well. And I think there are multiple new opportunities to figure out how we cross investments in funds like PCEF [Portland Clean Energy Fund], with transportation and TriMet, and some of those things are discussions that are already happening. So it’s very exciting. And we do need to explore other ways to address revenue challenges and our declining revenue for transportation, so we do need to push and work with the state for the solutions and for those partnerships so that we can continue to do our basic services that we’re required to do as a local jurisdiction, and also make sure that we’re putting safety infrastructure in so that we can maintain our safe streets.

Keith: I’ll tackle it from the congestion standpoint. So congestion has increased 250% since about the mid-90s for all the so we’re spending more and more time in a car. The unfortunate thing is that we led the nation just a matter of seven, eight years ago with walking, biking and transit. We’ve lost that. It’s gone down by half. So the TriMet goal for 2030, is for 120 million riders. Today, it’s 60 million riders. That’s their goal, and they have to achieve that, because if they don’t, all of us just are suffering more and more delay and frustrations. So we have to make sure that we have a public safety system and a transit system that are tied together. When we use our transit for a cooling shelter or a warming shelter without providing basic shelter for those, we’re misusing that very important transit system, and then it feels and or is unsafe. On our multi-use paths, when we’re trying to bike to the Gateway parking garage, and we’re going through a humanitarian crisis, and we don’t bike anymore. These are things that I’m hearing from people that used to bike to the transit system to use it in a multimodal situation. We’re forcing families to then drive their kids to school. We’re forcing bus drivers that are uncomfortable or feel unsafe in a job that they should have as a routine and caring for their customers, which is you and me. We need a safer system in Portland. We need to improve livability, and then we need to invest in walking, biking and transit and protected systems so we can move from our cars and move faster to work.

Rene: When I chose to start my professional career in Portland, I thought of it as the most European city in 2000. A place where you could walk, where you cycle, where you took public transit. It is, and certainly was, a central part of our identity as a city that we embrace all those various components. I will say, in recent years, at times, that’s also become dogmatic. It was never a ‘war on cars.’ It was walk, cycle and take public transit because it was healthy, because it was social. And so I just want to maybe observe in recent years that it’s become a little bit more brutal. And I would also submit when you’re talking about in east Portland of your single mom with two kids, and you get to a doctor, you’re still going to use your car; and if you’re working in the outer suburbs and you work downtown, you’re likely still going to need to use a car to get to work. So I think we have to acknowledge that sometimes the classism in public transit discussion can go too far. I echo Commissioner Mapps’ points on stabilizing funding for transportation in our region. This is a really tough nut to crack, and we’re just going to have to partner with various government parties going forward on that. I also want to call out that I think a lot of the congestion in our region is in the suburban areas. We do have some in the city, but we’ve got to get I-5 expansion done. We’ve got to get the Interstate Bridge project done. That is a major congestion point on the West Coast. It’s frankly an embarrassment for us, and we’re not protecting the climate when cars are idling on I-5.