An artificial vs. natural showdown.

Editor’s Note, December 2022: Thinking about buying a Christmas tree? We’re bringing back this popular post weighing in on the great debate: pine vs. plastic, which tree is the better option for the planet? And if you decide to go for the ultimate sustainable option this year, check out our ten DIY trees that reuse and recycle.

Cascadia is a global center of Christmas tree farming, harvesting approximately nine million trees per year. Christmas tree farms pepper the region’s landscape, covering nearly 100,000 acres across British Columbia, Oregon (the top Christmas tree-producing state in the United States), and Washington (the fifth-largest producer). Together, these farms may store more than 80,000 tons of CO2 annually, roughly equal to the emissions produced by 17,000 cars in a year.

But is fresh-cut the greener choice? Or are reusable plastic trees, like most reusable goods, the better option? Short answer: with rare exceptions, real trees are better, at least when measured by their climate impact. Here’s a look at some of the biggest sources of greenhouse pollution in the four phases of a tree’s life—production, transport, use, and disposal—based mostly on analyses conducted by Montreal-based consulting firm Ellipsos in 2009 and PE International in 2010.

Production

Manufacturing accounts for nearly 70 percent of total greenhouse gas pollution released during a fake tree’s lifetime. Manufacturers fashion fake trees mostly out of two energy-intensive materials: steel and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a versatile plastic with an especially polluting production phase.

In contrast, as natural conifers grow, they soak up carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil and their cells. Though estimates vary significantly, growing Christmas trees may sequester nearly one ton of carbon dioxide per acre (see page 8), depending on the type of tree, growing conditions, and a host of other factors. Although each tree releases a portion of this gas at the end of its life as it decomposes or burns, the new crop of replacement trees absorbs a similar amount of carbon.

Transportation

The tree in your living room probably traveled a long way to get to you, accounting for another portion of its carbon footprint.

If you have an artificial tree, it—like 80 percent of artificial trees—probably traveled 1) by truck from a factory in China to a port, 2) across the Pacific Ocean on a container ship, 3) on another truck to your local big-box store, before 4) you finally drove it home. All told, the tree crossed more than 8,400 miles, emitting approximately 9 pounds of CO2, equivalent to driving a car more than 10 miles.

If the tree in your living room is natural, on the other hand, it likely journeyed far fewer miles than its fabricated counterpart. The typical US tree travels approximately 230 miles from 1) the site of seed production to 2) the nursery to 3) the farm to 4) the retailer and finally, 5) to a customer’s home. If you’re typical, you drove between five and seven miles to pick out your tree and bring it home; yet these miles account for as much as 50 percent of your natural tree’s total carbon footprint, according to Ellipsos. Up until that point, your tree traveled with a pack of its peers, making transportation far more efficient than during those last few miles when it was just you, your car, and your tree.

The distance you drive to buy your natural tree is a main determinant in whether your tree is a net sink or source for greenhouse gas pollution over its lifespan. If the trip from home to retailer and back is ten miles or fewer, the tree can act as a net sink of greenhouse gases, according to PE International. Beyond ten miles, it becomes a net source of emissions but may still have a smaller footprint than an artificial tree, depending on the rest of its lifecycle.

Lifespan

The number of years you will reuse a plastic tree is another factor to consider when deciding whether to go natural or...

Measuring the employment and tax losses to communities and how oil companies are avoiding or delaying cleaning up their long-polluted sites. Plus, looking ahead for Washington state planning.

Recent US oil refinery closures illustrate what Washington state, home to five oil refineries, would be smart to avoid: unplanned, unexpected, and sudden shutdowns. Since 2019 seven refineries in the United States alone have shuttered, most abruptly, taking with them more than 3,400 high-paying jobs and $21 million annually in taxes from local governments’ coffers—funds that had supported key services like schools and hospitals. At the same time, most of the oil companies that own the refineries have managed to forestall cleanup of their heavily polluted sites.

This new report details each closure’s story and the impacts on local communities. Without exception, the oil refineries’ corporate owners decided the sites’ future without community input.

Washington state has five aging oil refineries of its own, including ones owned by Marathon Petroleum, HF Sinclair, and Phillips 66, the same owners of several recently closed refineries. They support more than 2,000 jobs and over $24 million in local property taxes. Leaders and communities in Washington have a chance to learn from recent closures and do things differently: not to save a dying, polluting industry but to create a smoother path for the workers and communities by planning ahead now. Otherwise, the refinery owners and the whims of the volatile oil market may chart the state’s future for it.

In the state’s first full ranked choice election, the same pool of voters elected candidates from across the political spectrum.

Alaska’s midterm elections were a win for moderate politics. A moderate Republican regained her US Senate seat. A moderate Democrat will continue to serve as Alaska’s lone Congressperson in the US House. A conservative Republican returned to the governor’s mansion, while the state legislature appears poised to form a bipartisan majority in the Senate, with a much smaller chance the House does the same.

In the state’s first regular ranked choice general election, the politically mixed results reflected the independent streak of Alaska voters. The pairing of the open primary with ranked choice voting yielded a group of winning candidates that, collectively, is moderate and independent, just like Alaska’s electorate. The system also helped to check extremist candidates; was easy for voters to understand; reduced the power of political parties and hyperpartisan primary voters; and ensured no candidate won without a majority in the final round.

Alaska Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai presented the results live on KTOO 360TV and KTOO-FM. Voters approved Alaska’s election reforms in 2020, meaning Fenumiai and her agency have spent the last two years setting up the election system. Fenumiai choked up while thanking election workers before painstakingly walking viewers through the tabulations.

MURKOWSKI KEEPS US SENATE SEAT

Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was reelected to the US Senate for the fourth time, beating out challengers Kelly Tshibaka, a Trump-backed Republican, and Pat Chesbro, a Democrat.

Murkowski barely led Tshibaka in first round results, 43.37 percent to 42.6 percent, then pulled ahead for the win in Round 3, after votes for Republican Buzz Kelley, who dropped out but was still on the ballot, and then Chesbro, were redistributed. Murkowski captured 54 percent of final round votes. It’s the first time Murkowski has crested the 50 percent mark in a race.

The US Senate race was always between Murkowski and Tshibaka, the latest iteration of a struggle between the moderate and extreme strains of Republican politics in Alaska. Murkowski’s insistence on holding the middle-ish ground even as her party shifted to the right has angered a large chunk of Alaska Republicans for at least a decade. In 2010, Joe Miller, a candidate from the Tea Party, the precursor to Trump-centric conservative politics, bested Murkowski in the Republican primary. Murkowski then ran and won a write-in campaign in the general election. She roundly defeated Miller in 2016.

In 2022, Trump and Alaska’s Republican Party shunned Murkowski, but without a closed primary, the party couldn’t keep her out of the general election. Murkowski and Tshibaka easily secured spots on the November ranked choice ballot. Chesbro and Kelley rounded out the top four.

Murkowski’s campaign went full-on bipartisan, a smart move given that she needed Democrats’ rankings, first or second, to win, and because, as she told the Anchorage Daily News, “that’s who I am.” She endorsed Peltola, spoke about her support of women’s right to choose, and touted the benefits to Alaska of the $1 trillion federal infrastructure bill, a key piece of President Joe Biden’s agenda that Murkowski helped hammer out with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. She also stuck to her commitment to develop Alaska’s oil and gas fields, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And she voted against Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which directed $369 billion to clean energy, health care, and other climate investments.

Tshibaka, a pro-Trump conservative, grew up in Alaska, but lived outside the state for most of her adult life. She spent much of her campaign reestablishing her Alaska cred. Murkowski had eaten muktuk? She was carrying some in her purse? Well, Tshibaka had made muktuk, according to a story in The New Yorker. (Muktuk is whale skin and blubber, ...

Progressives and conservatives find common ground on easing regulations on housing and business development.

By a unanimous 12--0 vote, the Anchorage Assembly voted Tuesday to repeal parking mandates across Alaska’s most populous city.

The common-sense zoning reform found sponsors across the political spectrum, championed by progressive Daniel Volland and co-sponsored by conservative real estate broker Kevin Cross and by Forrest Dunbar, who just won election to the Alaska State Senate as a Democrat. The two other members of the conservative voting bloc on the Assembly followed suit, voting “aye” alongside the liberal majority. (The Assembly is technically nonpartisan, but the political leanings of members are well known.)

There was little debate that parking mandates, which prescribe a particular minimum number of parking spots for every new building in the city, were an unnecessary barrier to building more homes and businesses. Bill sponsors have argued that Anchorage has too much parking, and builders are already incentivized to have enough parking to meet market needs. Development in Anchorage is already notoriously difficult due to the short construction season and high costs for materials and labor, often making the cost of construction more expensive than the potential property value.

“There is broad consensus that can be found around the issue of wanting to support housing in Anchorage to address the housing shortage,”

Volland said in a work session leading up to the vote.

“I think that we have an Assembly committed to doing that.”

Land use codes for the municipality have a big impact regionally: with nearly 300,000 residents, the city is home to 40 percent of all Alaskans. Covering just over 1,700 square miles, it’s the fourth-largest city by land area in the United States and larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Cross, who has extensive experience in real estate and served as Chair of the Anchorage Platting Board campaigned on simplifying permitting. He explained last week that no one was going to remove their parking overnight.

"This is going to be a gradual process as people take advantage of it,”

he said. The flexibility would enable more business opportunities within neighborhoods and revitalize older buildings on space-constrained lots for the select group of property owners who take advantage of it.

“There’s great bipartisan support for these kind of reforms,”

said Dunbar.

“One of my main motivations for this---and for all of us---is we have an affordable housing in crisis in Anchorage right now. This is a modest but important step towards making both new construction, and crucially the repurposing of existing buildings, more affordable.”

Even conservative Mayor Dave Bronson, who has been at odds with the Assembly on other issues, congratulated them on the ordinance. He wrote, “This change will make more housing projects economically viable,” he wrote Wednesday. “I have stated before, there’s no daylight between myself and the Assembly when it comes to the need for housing.”

The planning department walked so the Assembly could run

Anchorage’s parking reform process began with a proposed ordinance from its city planning department. The ordinance included modest reductions to parking requirements and was limited to certain parts of the city. But the election of newcomers Volland and Cross this last spring opened the door to a larger conversation about how the city could remove barriers to new development.

Volland and his cosponsors approached the planning department with a new idea: get rid of parking mandates entirely. Over the last few months, a working group of transportation advocates, Assembly members, and staff from the development services and planning departments extensively reworked the reform.

The Assembly adopted that substitute version of the initial ordinance which eliminated all parking minimums citywide. The ordinance also increased ratios for disability-accessible parking spaces and included m...

While the most pro-housing parties didn’t win big support from voters, they pulled the conversation toward a more housing-abundant policy future for the province.

The recent elections in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, created a stir among pro-housing advocates. In one of North America’s most expensive cities to rent or buy a home, numerous parties campaigned on statements that even just a few years ago pundits would have considered a third rail. They promised to address the region’s housing shortage by ending the ban on apartments citywide—including the leafy single-detached-house neighborhoods long kept off-limits to additional housing.

While ultimately these more stridently pro-housing parties didn’t win the majority of residents’ support, they did shift the regional conversation. Indeed, the party that won both a majority on city council and the mayor’s seat, the centre-right ABC Vancouver party, vowed to deliver on recently approved plans to build thousands more homes in selected parts of the city and to ease approval processes for new proposals. What’s more, a party that claimed there had been too much development in recent years failed to win much of Vancouverites’ support at all.

TEAM’S TOUGH TIME

The party TEAM for a Livable Vancouver was most vocal in its position that the city had gone too far in terms of welcoming new people and construction, its bounty of yard signs especially conspicuous in front of west-side single-detached homes. A TEAM win could have signaled broader resistance to the abundant housing agenda.

But the TEAM vote never matched the TEAM publicity. Instead, its mayoral candidate, first-term councillor Colleen Hardwick, won only about 10 percent of the vote. The rest went to parties and candidates that espoused pro-housing platforms ranging from extremely strong to mildly strong on both the left and right.

PRO-HOUSING PARTIES’ PROGRESS

Left-leaning OneCity Vancouver promised to allow everything from duplexes to small apartment buildings everywhere throughout the 60 percent of the city that is now reserved for only the most expensive form of housing, single-detached houses.

Highly centrist Progress Vancouver, said much the same, but added a new detail. It would push for denser housing around city schools that have been emptying out, and along transit lines.

Former mayor Kennedy Stewart, seen by most as left-wing, and his Forward Together party promised to get city approvals for 220,000 new homes in the next decade. He also continued to pitch his idea of allowing up to six homes on any residential lot in Vancouver.

The very right-wing Non-Partisan Association party, which might have chosen to appeal to the same disaffected single-detached home owners as TEAM, instead opted for a message that the city desperately needs more housing everywhere in the city. The party failed to win any seats.

Overall, candidates from the more left and progressive parties—OneCity, Forward Together, and Vision Vancouver—did not win broad support from voters. But area leaders watching the election assert that the housing discourse shifted importantly this year.

“The political consensus on housing policy in the election is that it generally was shifting to an aggressive build-out of new houses,”

said Khelsilem, the current chair of the Squamish Nation council, one of three Indigenous groups in the region who have become major housing builders in Vancouver.

“There were different scales and approaches, but they were different ways of achieving the same outcome.”

He said the public seems to have agreed that demand-side policies—mechanisms aimed at speculators or investors, like speculation taxes and empty-homes taxes—are not succeeding in making housing more affordable in Vancouver or in Canada more generally. He added,

“Governments that have tried to use just demand-side tools haven’t achieved anything.”

That opinion was widely shared by market-rate and nonprofit housing developers alike, as well as housing researche...

Five policy shifts could help communities harden their homes against fire danger.

My family lives in fire country in Idaho, Montana, and Washington. A new era of megafires that no amount of firefighting can control is forcing all of us across Cascadia to learn a new way to live with fire. Wildfires have become more frequent, larger in acreage, and more severe, and the risk they pose to those in their path is predicted to increase two- to sixfold in most areas of the West.

More firefighting is not the answer. What my family has discovered, and what wildfire scientist Jack Cohen has been saying for years, is that we cannot avoid extreme wildfires, but we can avoid devastating damages.

This fall, my mother, with guidance and financial assistance from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (MDNRC), is pruning or removing flammable trees and brush near her home and regularly watering the lawn. Taking these and other measures to keep flames away from homes, schools, and businesses is commonly called “creating defensible space.” She also plans to cover her vents with ⅟8-inch metal mesh screens and caulk any gaps where embers could enter the home and ignite it from the inside.

Thankfully she already has a metal roof. Her actions toward making the structure itself fire-resistant are referred to as “home hardening.” In this and subsequent related articles, I will refer to home hardening and creating defensible space together as “fire hardening.” Short of living in a concrete bunker, we can’t guarantee that our homes will survive a wildfire, but fire hardening them dramatically improves the odds.

Fire hardening homes and communities is a cornerstone of climate resilience and adaptation. The question is, how can we make it a new norm? The first step is redefining wildland-urban fire as a home ignition problem, not as a problem of controlling wildfires. Aside from changing how fire is portrayed in the media (ahem, journalists!), shifting funding from suppression to fire hardening would cue this shift in our collective understanding. These funds could pay fire hardening professionals to provide services such as reroofing, covering vents, tree removal, and yard maintenance to homeowners in fire country or reimburse these homeowners’ fire hardening expenses through grants and tax breaks.

Another step is overcoming some serious market disincentives that prevent developers from building fire-resistant communities and that keep homeowners from fire hardening their existing homes. But adopting and enforcing mandatory wildfire building codes may be the most effective way to overcome market disincentives and to etch the home-hardening norm into our collective consciousness.

This is the first article in a short series on adapting to our new wildfire normal. These articles will investigate two cornerstones of living with wildfires: creating fire-adapted communities and returning “good fire” to the land.

Extreme wildfire conditions are here to stay

Of all the forest fires that ignite in the United States, 97 percent are put out on initial attack. But the 3 percent of fires that escape often grow to more than 100,000 acres, qualifying as “megafires.” There will be more of these large fires that are impossible to stop until the rains come or the wind changes, no matter how many patches of forests managers attempt to thin, how many bulldozers push control lines, or how many airtankers dump thousands of gallons of water, each flight-hour costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, in their attempts to extinguish the blaze.

Wildfire suppression expenditures in the United States have increased twentyfold over the past 35 years, hitting $4.5 billion in 2021. Yet community losses continue to rise. When health and productivity costs are included, California’s 2018 fire season cost the US economy some $149 billion. That’s 0.7 percent of US GDP.

In the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which describes the transition zone between unpe...

A week after Election Day, we round up the region’s ballot measures and ranked choice contests.

What a week! Tons of elections results have already come in, and a few more contests are yet to be decided. While every race on the ballot is important, let’s focus on how some of Cascadia’s democracy-related ballot measures and elected offices turned out in the midterm elections.

No results are final until election officials certify the counts over the next month, but after a week of counting, preliminary results are pretty close to where they’ll end up. And in many cases, the margins of victory are large enough that observers such as the Associated Press and the Oregonian are confident in the winners despite some ballots left to count.

EXTENSIVE CHANGE FOR PORTLAND’S GOVERNMENT

After eight failed attempts in a century, voters approved a comprehensive change to Portland’s charter last week. At the time of writing, 58 percent of voters supported measure 26-228, the first change to the city’s government and elections systems since 1913. As part of this change, Portland will move away from its unusual commission form of government, create a larger city council with four districts each electing three members, and implement ranked choice voting for choosing city officials (including proportional ranked choice voting for each council district). For more details about the changes, check out our FAQ written before the election.

The city has already hit the ground running on implementing these changes. In 2023, an appointed districting committee will conduct research and community outreach to draw the four council districts. Applications are open now for Portlanders interested in serving on the committee, and other opportunities for engagement will be available soon. A separate salary committee will be appointed to decide compensation for the new elected officials (removing that role from city council). Finally, a general transition advisory committee will oversee and guide the city’s work to enact this ballot measure over the coming years.

The first election under the new system will occur in November 2024, when every elected position (the mayor, the auditor, and 12 councilmembers) will be contested. The new system of government goes into effect when these officials take office in January 2025, though some things will start changing in the next two years of transition. Mayor Ted Wheeler has already announced his intention to reorganize bureau assignments and get a jump-start on how departments might be run under the new city manager system. Sightline will continue to research and publish about implementation details during the transition period.

RANKED CHOICE VOTING FOR SEATTLE PRIMARIES

As more ballots are received and counted, it looks like ranked choice voting will be coming to Seattle as well. Just over 50 percent of voters wanted to see a change to the city’s primary elections, and fully three quarters of voters preferred that the change be ranked choice voting instead of approval voting. Seattleites will likely see ranking options on their primary ballots in August 2025, according to Sightline’s analysis.

While the city isn’t allowed to get rid of its top-two primary due to statewide rules, this vote from Washington’s largest city could be the push the state legislature needs to pass a bill that would allow localities to implement ranked choice voting in its full form—that is, not just for primary elections as in Seattle but in general elections, too.

CASCADIAN COUNTIES SPLIT ON RANKED CHOICE VOTING

Multnomah County, Oregon’s largest and home to the city of Portland, supported changing to ranked choice voting by more than a two-to-one margin. This makes Multnomah the second county in Oregon to use the system, after Benton County adopted it in 2016.

Farther north, however, two Washington counties voted against changing their elections to use to ranked choice voting. Right across the Columbia River from Portland and Multnomah County...

A larger, more diverse, and competitive candidate pool coincided with the introduction of open primaries and ranked choice voting.

In Alaska, 2022 was the year of the Independent. Freed by the state’s return to open primaries, nearly half of Alaska candidates running for governor, lieutenant governor, US House, and US Senate chose not to identify with either major party. As a result, the pool of candidates in those statewide races actually came close to mirroring Alaska’s majority-Independent electorate.

This and other changes may be the result of a decision by Alaska voters in 2020 to adopt a new election system pairing open primaries with ranked choice general elections. While many factors affect a candidate’s choice to run for office, we hypothesize the new system opened the door to candidates who wouldn’t have chosen to run otherwise, leading to a more diverse candidate cohort and more competitive races.

Sightline analyzed seven primary election candidate pools from 2010 to 2022. The focus was on statewide candidates. (Our analysis of state legislative races is coming in a separate article.) We found the 2022 statewide candidate cohorts looked different from earlier cycles’ pools in the following ways:

More candidates identified as Independent and third-party.

More Alaskans ran for office overall.

No statewide primaries involved just one candidate (so, more of these races were actually competitive).

More women ran for office.

CANDIDATES DRIFTED FROM THE MAJOR PARTIES

In 2022, the primary candidate pool came closer than ever to reflecting the independence of Alaska voters. About 58 percent of Alaskans are registered Independents, not affiliated with any political party, and another 5 percent align with third parties or political groups. But historically, candidates in Alaska have had far less freedom than voters to define their political identities.

In 2018, Jason Grenn, an Independent, was aiming for his second straight term in the state House. Grenn was one of just a few Independent candidates running, which was odd given that more than half of Alaska voters were Independents, too. The demand was there, but the supply was not. What could explain the disconnect?

Getting through an election is difficult for any candidate, but Alaska statute at the time put up particularly high barriers for candidates who didn’t identify as Democrat or Republican. Getting on the primary ballot required candidates to, well, run in a primary. And there were just two choices: the Republican primary or the Democratic primary. But you couldn’t just hop into a primary and run as an Independent. State statute required all candidates to register as a voter with the political parties running the primary they wanted to enter. On the Republican side, only Republicans could run. The Democrats had a slightly bigger tent, sharing their primary with registered Libertarians and Alaskan Independence Party candidates. (Note: The Alaska Independence Party is different from the “Independents” described in this article. Its primary goal is to hold a statewide vote for secession.)

Grenn had been a registered Republican, but as a fiscal conservative with progressive social views, running as an Independent felt more authentic. As a political hybrid, he had no natural home in the primaries. The only path was to get his name on the general election ballot through a petition process. And so, just as he had in 2016, he waited outside coffee shops and went door to door gathering enough signatures from registered voters in his district to get into the general. Grenn ultimately lost the three-way race, his old seat going to a Republican with less than half the vote. He now represents Alaskans for Better Elections, the nonpartisan group that led advocacy for Alaska’s new election system.

“I could honestly say I had conservative street cred, but I wanted to be more honest about who I was as a candidate and where my values were,”

Grenn said in an interview this month.

“Th...

A wave of democracy-related measures are on the region’s ballots this November.

Voters across Cascadia will have the chance to decide charter amendments, funding levies, candidate races, and other elections in the November midterms. Dozens of jurisdictions will decide questions about the structure of their government, funding for services, and, yes, medicinal use of psilocybin mushrooms. Here’s a few of the democracy-related questions that Sightline is watching closely, plus ranked choice voting races in Alaska and Oregon.

BALLOT MEASURES—OUR OPPORTUNITY FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY

How we vote, what we vote for, and who gets to vote are all on the ballot in the midterms. Could this be a year that Cascadia blazes a path for fairer election methods?

PORTLAND’S CHARTER CHANGE

Voters in Portland, Oregon, will decide whether to change the city’s government and election systems. Ballot measure 26-228 would amend the city charter (Portland’s constitution) to elect city offices through ranked choice voting, expand City Council to 12 members elected from 4 geographic districts, and give councilors a more defined legislative role by shifting the management of city bureaus to an appointed city manager supervised by the mayor.

You can learn more about this proposed change from our FAQ on the ballot measure, our other research into the effects of these reforms, and educational materials from the City of Portland. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on measure 26-228.

Voters in ten other Oregon cities will consider amendments to their charters, including complete rewrites in Coburg and Detroit.

SEATTLE’S CHOICE ON ELECTION REFORM

Voters in Seattle, Washington, will consider two questions:

1. Should the city sunset its pick-one ballot style for primary elections?

2. Should the potential replacement be approval voting (1A) or ranked choice voting (1B)?

Every voter can weigh in on both questions. Even if you think there should be no change, you can select an option in the second question that would count if the first question passes.

Sightline executive director Alan Durning wrote a series of articles on the potential shortcomings of approval voting for Seattle. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on Seattle questions 1 and, for question 2, option 1B.

RANKED CHOICE VOTING IN COUNTIES BIG AND SMALL

Across the Northwest, voters in several counties will decide whether to implement ranked choice voting for county elected positions like commissioner, auditor, sheriff, and treasurer. Charter amendments to implement ranked choice voting are on the ballot in Clark County and San Juan County, Washington; and in Multnomah County, Oregon. In all three counties, the proposed amendment is one of several recommended by the county’s charter review commission.

Sightline has researched the effects of ranked choice voting for several years. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on Clark County Proposed Charter Amendment No. 10, San Juan County Charter Amendment Proposition No. 3, and Multnomah County Measure 26-232.

BRINGING ELECTIONS TO MORE PEOPLE

In Washington and Oregon’s biggest counties, voters will consider two different fixes that could increase the number of people weighing in on county elections.

King County, Washington, voters could decide to move their county elections (for offices like county council and assessor) from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years, putting them at the same time as federal races. This minor-sounding change would have a huge impact on voter turnout, potentially doubling the number of voters who weigh in on these important races.

Sightline’s Alan Durning wrote about how this change could bring a larger and more representative group of voters to King County’s elections—or rather, to bring the elections to that larger and more representative set of even-year voters. Based on our research, Sightline recommends a yes vote on King County Charter Amendment No. 1.

Meanwhile, Mul...

Transportation commissioners come and go, but policies to free up curb space remain perpetually stuck at City Hall.

It’s often said that local elections have the biggest impact on people’s daily lives. That’s why when people ask about how well Portland’s government is working, I just point them to the nearest parking meter.

In 2018 Portland officially adopted a policy to adjust meter rates based on how difficult it is to find a parking spot. If the block is full, prices go up; if the block is empty, prices come down. After San Francisco started adjusting its parking meters this way, drivers saved an average of five minutes looking for parking while paying slightly less at the meter.

But on any given afternoon today, unless you are headed to a stadium on game day, the hourly rate still hasn’t changed. The result has been that growing neighborhoods like Portland’s Northwest district have struggled to free up curb space—40 percent of its blocks are too full by city standards—even after years of improving its parking permit program. That is unlikely to change until meter rates can be more finely tuned.

This is one small story about how Portland’s form of government has left the city with an administrative attention span too short to follow through on its own good ideas.

GREAT POLICIES GET LOST IN PORTLAND’S CURRENT FORM OF GOVERNMENT

Sightline has written for years about the smart parking policies that Portland’s city council has adopted that would make it easier for neighborhoods to create parking permit districts and set meter rates at the right price to ensure every block has a few empty spots.

But these parking management tools, while among the best in the country, have been more likely to sit on a shelf than to open up actual parking spots at the curb. The small policy tweaks needed to put these tools into practice have remained unaddressed, high on no one’s list of priorities.

One of the obstacles: Portland’s system of government itself.

It’s just one example of how Portland’s government structure gets in the way of voters’ elected representatives and the policies they want to see. That could change with the proposed charter reform on the ballot this upcoming election, which would expand city council to 12 members and add a city manager to oversee operations.

In most other cities, anyone elected to city council would be able to take an interest in resolving these issues, and a city administrator would be able to keep agencies on track in doing so. But currently in Portland, the mayor delegates oversight of city bureaus among themselves and just four elected commissioners. Even if Donald Shoup himself (an academic researcher who wrote the literal book on parking policy) were elected, there is only a one in five chance he would be assigned oversight of the transportation bureau.

Former commissioner Steve Novick described the fundamental problem with the system in an 2017 op-ed for the Willamette Week.

“As soon as you assign bureaus to a commissioner, two things happen: Those bureaus become incredibly important to that commissioner, and everything else the city does becomes relatively unimportant,”

he said.

“The existence of the commission system reduced the universe of potential transportation champions by 80 percent.”

It’s not as if other commissioners don’t care about issues they don’t have direct oversight over; they simply don’t have the time. Even as Portland’s population has more than tripled over the past century, the number of commissioners has remained the same. Similarly sized cities of Denver and Boston split work among 13 council members compared to Portland’s 5.

Internally referred to as “the commissioner test,” bureaus are highly dependent on their assigned commissioner to bring policy updates to city council. Bureaus can be reassigned at any time to anyone, regardless of if they have expertise or even an interest in the work that agency does.

Multiple times in the past decade, Portland’s Bureau of Transportat...