And it’s a threat to the province’s climate commitments.

A chorus of North American fossil fuel boosters is once again pushing for more pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, this time purportedly to help Europe quit the 40 percent of its gas it imports from Russia. For example, Deborah Yedlin, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce in Canada’s fossil-fuel capital Calgary, declared,

“We must resurrect [LNG] projects—on the east and west coasts. It is a moral imperative.”

But like previous arguments for completing the mostly languishing LNG proposals on Cascadia’s West Coast, in British Columbia, these new ones do not add up. BC LNG proposals are solutions in search of a problem. Their fuel cannot be ready soon enough to matter to Europe and cannot be extracted and burned without harming the climate.

FIVE LNG PROPOSALS REMAIN IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, TWO THE PUBLIC CAN COMMENT ON NOW

Canada is home to a total of zero LNG export facilities. Of dozens proposed over the years in British Columbia, all but five are now dead. Most succumbed to a combination of market forces and concerted public opposition to fracking gas in eastern British Columbia and shipping it in liquified form off the Pacific Coast. The harms of fracking include health impacts like low birth weights, contaminated drinking water, degraded Indigenous land pockmarked with thousands of gas wells, and accelerated climate impacts.

Proponents of remaining BC LNG proposals promise to begin operations between 2025 and 2030, but if their past records of delay are any guide, these promises will prove to have been little more than wishful thinking.

Indeed, just one of the projects has started construction at all and is only 50 percent complete. This project, the Can$40-billion LNG Canada, has already pushed back its opening date from 2023 to mid-2025, a forecast that’s likely to slip further. Plus, the new Coastal Gaslink pipeline that TC Energy is building to supply LNG Canada has suffered repeated delays and will distinguish itself as one of the most expensive gas pipelines in the world. TC Energy pegged the pipeline’s cost at Can$4.4 billion in 2012, boosted the estimate to Can$6.6 billion in 2020, and in February warned that costs had “increased significantly,” without saying how much. Controversy about the pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across the territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, keeps mounting. Wet’suwet’en leaders recently called on the United Nations to investigate Coastal Gaslink for what they say is Canada’s violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Two other projects, the Tilbury Phase 2 Expansion project and Cedar LNG, await environmental assessments. (Members of the public can comment on both until mid-April.) Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound was issued its environmental approval in 2016 by then-Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine Mckenna, but the project languishes behind obstacles and lacks some permits. The last live project, Ksi Lisims, is so new that its timeline is highly speculative; a consortium that includes fossil fuel interests and the Nisga’a First Nation, only announced it in July 2021.

BY THE TIME BC’S LNG FACILITIES OPEN THEIR DOORS, EUROPE PLANS TO HAVE ELIMINATED ITS RELIANCE ON RUSSIAN GAS

British Columbia’s LNG is purportedly destined for Asia, not Europe. But because the market for LNG is increasingly global, with nearly 40 percent of LNG now traded on the spot market or via short-term contracts, adding Canadian LNG to the global supply could help Europe overcome its supply shortage.

But the EU will be sailing away from Russian gas just as BC’s LNG arrives to dock.

Not quite two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Commission outlined its new “REPowerEU” plan, which aims to reduce the EU’s reliance on Russian gas by nearly two-thirds before year’s end. About 60 percent of this reduction would come from securing alternate gas suppliers and the other 40 percent from lo...

The region counts 40 canceled oil, gas, and coal export projects since 2012.

Since 2012 fossil fuel executives from dozens of companies, including Kinder Morgan, Pembina Pipeline Corporation, and Enbridge, have schemed more than 50 large projects to export coal, oil, gas, or their derivatives from Cascadia’s coast in British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington.

But local communities, Tribes, environmentalists, and local governments rejected calls to turn Cascadia into a fossil fuel export terminal. Thanks to a combination of local opposition, see-sawing energy prices, and regulatory hurdles, project backers canceled 40 of those projects—a whopping 73 percent. Just 6 of all the proposed projects have been completed and are operational today.

Had all the once-proposed 55 projects gone ahead, it would have spelled disaster for the climate. Extracting, transporting, and burning the fuel associated with all the Cascadian fossil fuel export proposals would have spewed the equivalent of 2,095 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, roughly 30 percent of the entire annual greenhouse gas emissions of the United States and nearly three times the annual emissions of Canada. Instead, Cascadia averted 1,717 million metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Cascadia cannot claim victory just yet. Nine projects are not yet canceled, eight of which are in British Columbia, as shown by the map and graphic below and detailed in Sightline’s new report. Of the remaining projects, the decade-long multibillion-dollar boondoggle to expand the Trans Mountain oil pipeline would be the single largest greenhouse gas emitter. If a livable future is something leaders in Cascadia are serious about, they will also relegate these remaining projects to history’s trash can.

The discount rate, vanishing large-log mills, and fear of the spotted owl.

Extending timber harvest rotations is on the table as a triple bottom line solution—actually a sextuple bottom line solution. But is it really a good idea, and is it even possible? If so, how do we do it?

In my last article, I posed the question: do long rotations really boost carbon storage and produce more timber? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” This article investigates why today’s forest landowners log on short rotations and what stands in the way of extending rotations. In a future article, I will examine how, through careful planning and public investment, we can overcome these hurdles and transform Cascadia’s forest landscape to long rotations in a way that works for timber-dependent communities.

BRIEF REVIEW: THE SIX BOTTOM-LINE BENEFITS OF HARVESTING TIMBER ON LONGER ROTATIONS

A “forest rotation” is the number of years that a crop of trees is grown before the forest is logged and replanted. Long rotations mean growing trees longer before logging.

In the past, timberland owners cut their trees at a “biological rotation age.” A biological rotation age maximizes the amount of timber that the land can sustainably produce per year over time. For instance, the biological rotation age for Douglas-fir west of the Cascades might be 80–100 years. Today, most timber companies log their forests at a much shorter “financial rotation age,” often less than half the biological rotation age. By doing so, they maximize short-term profits at the expense of long-term timber volume, forest health, and carbon sequestration.

Why are long rotations a sextuple bottom line solution? First, they have garnered the most attention for being the best “natural carbon solution” for California, Oregon, and Washington (that’s solution #1 of 6). Modelers also show that long rotations produce more total timber as well as higher quality and more valuable lumber for building homes (that’s #2).

And, at a time when Washington and Oregon are scrambling to plan for wildfires (and pay for them), it turns out that long rotations likely mitigate fire severity (#3). Long rotations also improve water quantity and quality and serve as habitat for rare wildlife (#4 and #5). Finally, if history is a guide, extending rotations could help return stability to timber markets and flourishing economies to rural timber communities, if we can get past a transitional supply dip (and that’s #6).

IF LONG ROTATIONS ARE SO MUCH BETTER, WHY AREN’T THEY MORE COMMON?

#1. The time value of money

As mills sold off timberlands starting in the 1980s, the new owners changed from long rotations that maximize a steady supply of timber for the mill to management that maximizes their return on timberland investments (ROI). This is especially true for investor-owned Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Timberland Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs), which currently own a majority of private US timberlands. Large, family-owned timber companies also need short-term profits, especially if they want to invest in complementary businesses or grow their landholdings. It’s more lucrative to log short rotations on more land than long rotations on less land.

TIMOs and REITs have raked in windfall profits. From 1990 through 2007, TIMOs averaged a whopping 13 percent return on investment, exceeding the 11 percent averaged by the S&P 500 over the same period, with far less volatility (i.e., making them less risky).

When forestland is held as a financial investment, it must appreciate as fast as Apple or Tesla stock, or other competing investments. Investors want compounding growth, which means that value increases exponentially over time.

The opportunity cost of not cashing in the trees now and investing in lucrative land deals or Tesla stock means that income received in the future from long rotations is essentially worth less than the same income received today. This is why selling a smaller volume of timber toda...

The state land use board provisionally approved the rules but left room for tweaks by July.

Oregon’s statewide land use board declared its support Thursday for rules that, among other things, reduce or remove parking mandates in 61 jurisdictions in the state’s eight largest metro areas.

But the board stopped short of permanently approving the full package as written, instead voting unanimously to temporarily adopt the rules, a major update to state land use standards more than two years in the making.

“I think we’re 98 percent there,”

said Land Conservation and Development Commission Vice Chair Anyeley Hallova, who will move into the chair position of the governor-appointed board at its next meeting in July.

Commissioner Nick Lelack, who proposed the two-month slowdown, expressed support for the package but wanted more time to hear specific concerns on particular issues. He said he was responding in part to a letter received the previous night in which 29 mayors from around the state had urged delay.

“I want to be genuine in listening to people that we have just heard from for the first time,”

“The process isn’t complete.”

In order to have time to more fully address local jurisdictions’ concerns, the commission set a deadline of July 1 for future comments.

‘A CHANCE TO DO SO MUCH GOOD FOR FREE’

Lelack’s stated concern wasn’t with the parking components of the proposal, which he’d singled out for particular praise at the commission’s previous meeting.

“It’s pro-housing, pro-equity, pro-efficient-land-use,”

Lelack said.

“It addresses all the key issues we needed to address.”

Most of the oral testimony the board received in Thursday’s three-hour public hearing was similarly supportive: 32 testifiers generally in favor of the reform package and 19 opposed.

As we wrote earlier this week, parking mandates aren’t the main reason we have parking lots. We have parking lots because cars are useful and, in many cases, necessary. And Oregon isn’t considering a ban on parking lots, new or old.

But the effect of mandatory parking lots is to keep cars necessary. By forcing buildings apart and driving up the cost of adding homes, shops, and offices to walkable areas, parking mandates make it illegal for cities to ever gradually and voluntarily evolve away from auto dependence.

Parking mandates ban new Main Streets by requiring each new 2,000-square-foot cafe to be surrounded by 5,000 square feet of parking lot. They keep buildings vacant. They drive up the rent in new apartments by hundreds of dollars a month and kill the incentive of landlords and employers to save everyone money by coordinating shared cars or discounted transit passes. They induce deadly heat islands and, by forcing new buildings to be spread out, literally cast modern auto dependence into stone.

Transportation advocate and city planning consultant Cathy Tuttle was among those speaking Thursday in favor of removing parking mandates.

“The beauty of these administrative changes to eliminate parking mandates is that they’re easy to implement, and have the potential to do good without costing the state or the cities much money,”

Tuttle said.

“Rarely do we get a chance to do so much good for free.”

‘IT GIVES ME A STRESS ATTACK’

Parking was also on the minds of various local officials who spoke in opposition.

“Since I’ve been on council for 10 years now, I can sum up in three words some of the most important issues: parking, parking, parking,”

Eugene City Councilor Claire Syrett told the commission.

“It is a huge topic that you don’t expect when you join city council. . Frankly, as an elected official it gives me a stress attack to think about how we’re going to deal with this in terms of public engagement.”

In a state with soaring rents and sale prices, a state-estimated shortage of 111,000 homes, and one of the highest rates of homelessness in the U.S., the rules would increase the number of new homes, shops and offices that can be built without mandates for a certain number...

A word of caution to Cascadian lawmakers and regulators.

“We’re very bullish on renewable hydrogen,” hyped a representative from NW Natural, Oregon’s largest gas utility, when testifying in support of a 2021 hydrogen bill in Oregon. Hydrogen enthusiasm is at an all-time high, with the recent passage of multi-billion dollar subsidies by federal policy makers and major oil and gas corporations backing hydrogen projects, including Northwest utilities. Proponents of the fuel envision a future in which hydrogen—and specifically a strain of it being marketed as “renewable hydrogen”—heats homes and businesses, powers trains and cars, and balances the electric grid.

Renewable hydrogen, also known as green hydrogen, does have its place in a climate-friendly future, namely in cleaning up hard-to-decarbonize sectors like steelmaking, long-haul shipping, and aviation, and in generating electricity during windless, cloudy periods. Plus, existing hydrogen consumers, like petrochemical refineries, metallurgical industries, and ammonia and fertilizer manufacturers, could reduce their emissions by switching from hydrogen produced by fossil fuels to hydrogen produced from renewable electricity (see our primer on the different types of hydrogen).

But natural gas utilities, including those in Cascadia, have their eyes on a much bigger prize: pumping hydrogen through the natural gas pipeline system to heat buildings—and raking in the accompanying profits. Unfortunately, hydrogen is not the solution these fossil fuel corporations make it out to be, nor should it be their next cash cow. It merely slows progress on the much-needed shift to electrification, holding ratepayers subject to more expensive fossil fuel infrastructure and a more dangerous and less efficient fuel—all while slowing progress toward the region’s decarbonization goals. Lawmakers and regulators should beware the industry’s hype as they weigh hydrogen’s permitted uses.

HYDROGEN FOR HOME HEATING SCORES LOW ON EFFICACY, COST, EFFICIENCY, AND SAFETY

Despite being touted by natural gas utilities as the best path to clean home heating, hydrogen is much less effective at decarbonizing buildings than is electricity. Only small volumes of hydrogen, perhaps up to a ratio of 20 percent hydrogen to 80 percent natural gas, can safely be injected into existing gas pipelines. But a 20 percent blend of hydrogen only shaves off around 7 percent of the combustion emissions of a system running on 100 percent natural gas. Put in context, in Washington, for example, buildings’ emissions will need to decrease 96 percent by 2050 for the state to meet its legislated decarbonization commitments.

What’s more, blending higher ratios of hydrogen into existing natural gas infrastructure to achieve greater emissions reductions could cost billions. Most gas distribution pipelines would need to be replaced or extensively retrofitted to safely accommodate the new fuel, since at higher volumes than 20 percent, hydrogen can degrade pipelines. Plus, higher ratios of hydrogen are incompatible with existing appliances like stoves and water heaters, meaning consumers would also need to buy new hydrogen-compatible appliances. These replacement requirements and associated costs are why major studies for the Northwest conclude that wide-spread electrification is the least expensive pathway to decarbonize building.

Plus, hydrogen is less efficient than electricity at heating homes. A 2021 study found that heating a home with green hydrogen has an efficiency of around 46 percent.1 Heating a home with an electric air-source heat pump, on the other hand, has almost six times that efficiency, at around 270 percent. Yes, hydrogen could provide carbon-free heat in a home, but heating with hydrogen demands nearly six times as much renewable electricity as does an electric heat pump. Heating with hydrogen, in other words, is like drying your dishes with a blow torch.

Lastly, hydrogen introduces serious safety concerns. Hydrogen...

And no, it’s not a solution to Europe’s dependency on Russian oil.

On February 18, 2022, the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain Corporation revealed that the controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX) project is delayed yet again and will now cost Can$21.4 billion. This is a whopping four times the original Can$5.4 billion cost estimate offered by then-owner Kinder Morgan when it first proposed the project a decade ago.

The project, which is about 50 percent complete, will “twin” the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, transporting some of the world’s dirtiest oil from the tar sands in Alberta across British Columbia to Burnaby, BC. From there, it will be loaded onto oil tankers and shipped for export through the Salish Sea along BC and Washington coastlines. If completed, the project will triple the capacity of the existing pipeline, reaching a total capacity of about 890,000 barrels per day, more than the recently cancelled Keystone XL pipeline would have carried.

Since Kinder Morgan first proposed the project in 2012, it has faced multiple lawsuits and staunch opposition from dozens of First Nations and Indigenous groups, environmental organizations, and local governments in both Canada and the United States. As we make sense of this latest announcement, and as oil industry boosters are using the Russian invasion of Ukraine to promote building more Canadian oil pipelines, it’s worth revisiting why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should cancel the project—indeed should have canceled it years ago. We count at least five big reasons:

1. CANADIANS STAND TO LOSE BILLIONS FROM THE PROJECT

Although the business case for the pipeline has always been shaky, the latest cost increase confirms that the pipeline has turned into a giant money pit, putting the Canadian public’s dollars at risk.

Trudeau’s government bought the existing pipeline and the expansion project as a buyer of last resort in 2018 for Can$4.5 billion from US-based pipeline giant Kinder Morgan after it walked away in the face of mounting delays, costs, and opposition. The prime minister promised that after construction was complete, his administration would sell the pipeline for a profit and use the proceeds to fund the country’s clean energy transition. Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland repeated this claim after the February 18th announcement.

Some First Nations along the pipeline’s route have expressed interest in a full or partial ownership stake of the pipeline, while dozens of others, including the Squamish Nation and the Tsleil-Waututh Nation have steadfastly opposed the project and challenged it multiple times in court. As Geraldine Manson, Elder of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, who opposes the pipeline, told Sightline,

“The government is not listening to First Nations. If they are going to a First Nation community and offering them dollars they need, of course they will take those.. We can’t judge the community for having no infrastructure and no dollars to survive for their future.”

However, the new Can$21.4 billion cost estimate makes abundantly clear that if the Trudeau administration completes and sells the pipeline, it will be at a stupendous loss, not at a profit. As Omar Mawji, energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told Sightline,

“I don’t know who will purchase it unless it’s at a huge discount.”

Indeed, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux told Canada’s National Observer that he is

“not hopeful that there will be any profits to be made from that pipeline, at least for the federal government.”

Losses are inevitable because the tolls that oil producers, also known as shippers, will pay Trans Mountain to use the pipeline do not and cannot cover the full capital cost of the project. As data shows, since Kinder Morgan first proposed the expansion project, capital costs have increased from Can$5.4 billion to Can$7.4 billion to Can$12.6 billion, and as of the latest announcement, ...

Housing shortages don’t stay confined to city limits. Parking reform shouldn’t either.

It’s not every day that elected leaders ask for less authority. But at a California Assembly committee hearing in April, two out of every three representatives for local governments testified in support of a new bill that would limit their zoning authority.

AB 2097, introduced by Assemblymember Laura Friedman, would prohibit cities from mandating off-street parking near high-quality transit, in an effort to increase housing production across the state.

For decades, nearly every city in North America has required new buildings to have a specific number of parking spaces, regardless of whether they were downtown or surrounded by empty parking lots. These regulations were successful in building a lot of parking spaces, even as housing for Californians has grown harder to come by. In the highly sought-after Bay Area, there are twice as many parking spaces as people.

Some of the cities represented, like San Diego and Emeryville, have already done away with local rules requiring off-street parking. But elected officials from Gilroy to Culver City had not, and they were hoping the state would intervene in what is often a contentious land use fight.

The sentiment is not just a Californian one. On the other side of the border in Oregon, Talent city council president Eleanor Ponomareff told a state land use board the same thing earlier this year, in regards to a policy change that would significantly reduce parking requirements in Oregon’s metro areas.

“Implementation at the state level means fewer battles we, at the local level, have to fight,”

she said. Officials from Talent have their hands full already, as they recover from a 2020 wildfire that destroyed one- third of local homes, worsening a pre-existing shortage of affordable housing. As governments across Cascadia try to course-correct decades of underbuilding housing, its critical to acknowledge the limits of what local governments can achieve on their own.

Back in Sacramento, one of the local officials at April’s hearing was Colin Parent, who serves on the City Council of La Mesa, a small suburban community ten miles east of San Diego. Every home in La Mesa is required to have two off-street parking spots, whether or not residents need them. Even though Parent is in favor of eliminating parking requirements, his fellow councilors have little appetite for a politically difficult reform.

“That’s not an issue on the table,”

Parent said.

“I think that’s similar to most cities in California.”

Assembly member Friedman knows this all too well. She recalled a case from her time on the Glendale City Council when a family wanted to add a bathroom to their home, but to do so would have had to build a three-car garage to bring the home up to current codes. The family never ended up building their bathroom, and Friedman wasn’t successful in building more flexibility into the zoning code. She lost by one vote.

LOCAL PARKING REQUIREMENTS ADD UP TO A STATEWIDE HOUSING SHORTAGE

There’s reason to believe that most voters prioritize housing over parking. But most voters don’t show up to zoning hearings. Instead, local zoning meetings often go something like this: the more localized a land use change is, the more heavily the scales are tipped towards the status quo. Current residents can easily visualize the downsides of new development, like more traffic or a blocked view. But the future residents who will benefit from those new homes aren’t there to advocate for themselves in the same way.

This imbalance in political power makes zoning changes difficult, even in the most progressive cities. As a result, local leaders can be hesitant to stick their necks out and instead choose to focus on other issues. Michael Manville, an urban planning professor at UCLA, thinks state action is appropriate.

“Even though things are sort of trending in the right direction, the fact is that the vast majority of local governmen...

Voters could approve changes to the city’s elections and form of government this November.

Yesterday, Portland’s Charter Commission voted to advance some of its reform proposals to be drafted into potential ballot measures by the City Attorney. The proposals moving forward include changes to the city’s form of government and elections. They are based on research done by the Commission and input from thousands of Portlanders over the past year. After months of deliberation over the details and values represented in these proposals (and more discussion to come), all 20 Charter Commissioners voted to send these proposals to be drafted into ballot measures.

For over a year, the Charter Commission has been meeting to discuss potential reforms to the city’s form of government and elections and hear from Portlanders what they want out of their city government. Sightline has written about the Commission’s purpose, powers, timeline, and areas of focus, as well as the history of prior charter reform efforts. But even before the Commission was established for this decade’s Charter review, groups like the City Club of Portland and League of Women Voters of Portland were researching different issues relating to form of government and elections. And for over a century, Portlanders have been debating how well their form of government and elections are serving them.

So what’s actually happening now? Last night’s vote was a major step forward by the Commission, but nothing about city government is changing just yet. Voters will need to approve the proposals in November 2022 before they can be implemented. In the next few weeks, the City Attorney will draft ballot language, the Charter Commission will edit and refine details, and the public will continue to weigh in. In June, the Commission will take its final vote on these reforms to place them on the ballot for Portlanders to vote on. If 15 out of 20 Charter Commissioners vote in favor of sending Charter reforms to the ballot, those referenda will bypass Portland’s City Council and head straight to voters.

THE CHARTER COMMISSION’S PROPOSALS

Over the coming weeks, the City Attorney will start drafting the following proposals for the Charter Commission to continue editing and then vote on. For more details about the Commission’s process and reasoning, see the progress report it released last week.

ELECT A LARGER CITY COUNCIL BY MULTI-MEMBER GEOGRAPHIC DISTRICTS

The Charter Commission’s proposal would split the city’s voters into four districts that each elect three city councilors. This proposal would increase the size of the City Council to 12 members from its current five, which could increase the number of viewpoints represented in council discussions. The Commission notes that single-member districts would prevent people of color from being able to elect a candidate of their choice in Portland, because they are not sufficiently concentrated in any area of the city to make up a majority of any district. Electing multiple members in each district allows representation for groups that are not geographically concentrated, like renters or people of color.

Multi-member districts, elected proportionally (see below), make it possible for multiple groups to be represented in a single district. In contrast, a single councilor can never represent the full diverse spectrum of political views present among their constituents. The Charter Commission won’t draw the districts themselves, but it will include some guidelines and a process for a different body (like a citizen committee) to draw the districts moving forward.

LET PORTLANDERS RANK THEIR CHOICES FOR ELECTED OFFICE

The Charter Commission’s proposals would also shift Portland away from its current pick-one method of electing candidates to a ranked choice voting system. Ranked choice voting is a system where voters get to rank multiple candidates in order of their preference. During ballot counting, voters’ later choices are counted if their earl...

Santa Claus is on the ballot, but that’s only one of the reasons.

Closed primary elections are not ideal for American democracy. In most states, the Democratic and Republican parties act as gatekeepers. They regularly bar independent voters from taking part, giving small percentages of older, wealthier hyperpartisans the power to select the general election menu for all levels of government. Appeasing this subset of voters requires politicians to both run and govern closer to the extremes, leaving the somewhat more moderate independent voters that make up 40 percent of the American electorate with scant representation.1 Mix in misinformation and carefully cultivated culture wars and voila! America is far more divided than it should be.

Open primaries, so called because they’re open to all candidates and all voters, are one antidote to fevered partisanship. In an open primary, the major parties can’t dictate which voters take part. And with all voters in play, candidates have less incentive to ally themselves with those on the fringes.

But not all open primaries are the same. “Top-four” or “top-five” races send the four or five top candidates on to the general election. Others, called “top-two” races, send just two. The number of candidates that advances matters hugely to an open primary’s success in overcoming the more destructive forms of partisanship and building a well-rounded slate of candidates. Alaska’s top-four primary system has important advantages over those in states such as Washington and California, where only two candidates make it to the general election:

Minimizing the chances that one party will monopolize the general election ballot;

Leaving more room for third-party and independent candidates to compete;

Opening the way to ranked choice voting; and

Reducing the need for strategic voting, where voters support a candidate who’s not their favorite but can likely beat the one they just can’t stand and/or has the best chance at success.

Here’s more on why advancing four (or five) candidates from an open primary is better than just two.

IN A TOP-FOUR OPEN PRIMARY, PARTIES HAVE A HARDER TIME MONOPOLIZING THE GENERAL ELECTION

In 2016, two Democrats won the top-two open primary for one of California’s Senate seats. Kamala Harris, now Vice President, won 40 percent of the open primary vote. Second-place candidate Loretta Sanchez won 19 percent. It was the first time since California introduced direct elections in 1914 that no Republican had ended up on the ballot. True, the state has shifted leftward, and a Republican win would have been a stretch. But if the primary had yielded more winners, Republican voters at least could have had representation on the ballot and a voice in the general election contest through the third- and fourth-place primary finishers, Duf Sundheim and Phil Wyman.

A similar situation unfolded in Washington State in 2020, where the top-two open primary for lieutenant governor sent two Democrats to the general election. About 7 percent of the nearly 1,000 top-two primaries run in Washington State since 2008 have seen candidates from the same party advance to the general. In 37 general elections, Democrats have been the only party on the ballot. Same goes for Republicans in 32 elections.

Top-two proponents argue that same-party elections simply reflect the preferences of a particular political jurisdiction. If a district is overwhelmingly Democratic, what’s the problem with having two Democrats running? they would say. Well, if more bipartisanship and less polarization is the goal, America’s political systems should be structured accordingly. Running two candidates of the same political party in a general election, to the exclusion of all other candidates, eliminates a high-profile public forum for debating political philosophies. And when people do not see their values represented in a race and/or don’t like the candidates, they become alienated from the democratic process.

Duopoly is a proble...

The reform proposal, authorized by the state’s anti-sprawl laws, is up for a vote this week.

About 100 years ago, governments started redesigning cities around cars. On Thursday, Oregon could approve a major step to prioritize space for people and businesses again, and reduce pollution in the process.

At the heart of its effort: sharply reducing urban and suburban parking mandates.

These little-known laws that make parking lots mandatory spread quickly and quietly across the rich world, including Cascadia and nearly all of North America, in the mid-twentieth century. They banned projects that included less than a certain, often arbitrary number of parking spaces. This in turn made it illegal or prohibitively expensive to create homes, shops, or offices in many places where driving is less necessary.

In effect, parking mandates declare a parking space to be more important than a home or a job.

Oregon’s proposed reform would begin to reverse that. Over the next three years, it would give the 61 jurisdictions in the state’s eight largest metro areas—the urbanized areas in and around Albany, Bend, Corvallis, Eugene, Grants Pass, Medford, Portland, and Salem, home to about two-thirds of the state’s population—various options for rolling back or eliminating their decades-old parking mandates, especially in designated “climate-friendly areas” (CFAs). The CFAs, whose borders would be drawn by most of the jurisdictions over the next few years, would also allow mixed-use buildings of up to four stories and see higher standards for walking, biking, and transit investments.

MANDATORY PARKING: ‘A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY’

Parking mandates aren’t the main reason we have parking lots, of course. We have parking lots because cars are useful and, in many cases, necessary. And Oregon isn’t considering a ban on parking lots, new or old.

But the effect of mandatory parking lots is to keep cars necessary. By forcing buildings apart and driving up the cost of adding homes, shops, and offices to walkable areas, parking mandates make it illegal for cities to ever voluntarily evolve away from auto dependence.

Parking mandates ban new Main Streets by requiring each new 2,000-square-foot cafe to be surrounded by 5,000 square feet of parking lot. They keep buildings vacant. They drive up the rent in new apartments by hundreds of dollars a month and kill the incentive of landlords and employers to save everyone money by coordinating shared cars or discounted transit passes. They induce deadly heat islands and, by forcing new buildings to be spread out, literally cast modern auto dependence into stone.

“There’s always this assumption that everyone wants to have a car, but it’s, like, a self-fulfilling prophecy,”

said Sergio Cano, 40, a middle-school social studies teacher in Albany, Oregon, in an interview last week.

“We need to stop that cycle at some point.”

‘FEWER PEOPLE AND DESTINATIONS ARE WALKING DISTANCE’

Cano, who said his own family owns cars and expects to always need to, nevertheless submitted testimony supporting the parking reforms last fall. It was part of the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development’s two-year process to update statewide transportation and land use rules. Oregon calls the project “Climate-Friendly and Equitable Communities.”

The project comes out of Oregon’s 50-year tradition of state-led land use planning. It’d be the state’s latest effort to enforce its law requiring jurisdictions within metro areas to “encourage the availability of adequate numbers of needed housing units at price ranges and rent levels which are commensurate with the financial capabilities of Oregon households.” Among other things, the state also requires its metro areas’ transportation systems to “minimize adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts and costs,” “conserve energy,” and “meet the needs of the transportation-disadvantaged.”

Cano’s was one of hundreds of comments on the proposal received by the commission, its member...