With 57 percent in favor of Proposition 1 (and 150,000 ballots in; last updated August 7, 2025), Seattle voters have reaffirmed their commitment to advancing a more democratic city government. Seattle's iconic Democracy Voucher Program will have funding for another ten years.

This renewal means the city can continue to lead the way in the share of its population who contribute to city campaigns. Candidates will keep having more reasons to knock on doors rather than spend hours a day calling up the wealthiest people they know to fund their campaigns. And Seattle residents will get more choices in their elections and more power to express their views.

Along with helping to design the initial policy, Sightline has documented the impressive effects from the program's first decade:

The program has unlocked an "incredible explosion in participation" in campaign funding and empowered a much more representative group of people to become donors.

It decreased large donations and elevated small ones, and it pushed away money coming from outside the city. For example, before the program was implemented, in the 2013 election cycle, gifts of $400 or more made up almost 60 percent of campaign dollars; in 2023, those large contributions plummeted to 9 percent of funds.

The program even helped boost voter turnout, likely because of increased personal touches from candidates.

While it couldn't put a damper on dark money (no one can, thanks to US Supreme Court cases including Buckley v. Valeo, Citizen United v. FEC, and McCutcheon v. FEC), the program also didn't cause a spike in those "independent expenditures" - PAC spending is up everywhere.

Democracy vouchers have encouraged more diverse candidates to run and given them a pathway to win. Almost all viable candidates have participated in the program since it began, including people with viewpoints across Seattle's political spectrum.

The program has done all that with "budget dust," a portion of the city budget you need a magnifying glass to see in a chart.

Tuesday's vote shows Seattleites' confidence in the program and belief in the importance of doing everything possible to make their government representative and accountable. City residents face many daily challenges - and the stronger and more democratic our governments, the better equipped they are to understand and respond to what's happening in people's lives.

One component of the measure that passed is a directive for the mayor, city council, and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (the SEEC, the entity that manages the program) to convene a workgroup to explore potential improvements to the program. While the SEEC has already tweaked some elements based on ongoing feedback, the workgroup will offer a more defined process for additional recommendations, considering input from candidates, campaign staff, consultants, advocates, and the SEEC.

Commentators have already pointed to spending caps for possible modification, particularly given the large number of PAC funds that enter city races. Others have suggested shifting the timing of voucher mailings, improving outreach, and allowing candidates into apartment buildings to meet voters. Some might look beyond the program to other ideas for making political donors more accountable, perhaps following Maine's example (currently moving through the courts) to limit donations to super PACs.

Future city elections will get another boost toward fairer representation: Seattle will start using ranked choice voting in city primaries in 2027, the next local primary election. Ranked choice voting offers similar voter-centric benefits as democracy vouchers: candidates benefit from knocking on more doors and talking to more voters because they seek out second-choice votes as well as first choices; more diverse candidates tend to run and win, because voters don't have to just pick the popular option while others get squeezed out; and voters get a more nuanced way to express their political choi...

Editor's introduction: John Vaillant is a Cascadian icon. An award-winning and bestselling author residing in Vancouver, British Columbia, he has written gripping tales, both fiction and nonfiction, on the nuanced interfaces between people and nature.

Vaillant's 2023 Pulitzer finalist book Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World recounted the harrowing 2016 megafire in the Alberta oil town of Fort McMurray, weaving in the histories of the oil industry, climate science, and the very technology of fire in human history. His account not only won international praise; it also drove urgent conversations about our new age of ultra-destructive, climate-fueled wildfires - a topic Sightline has also researched.

Below, John Vaillant shares his reflections on developments since publishing Fire Weather, answering questions from Sightline researchers.

The Los Angeles fires this past January were a signal event that forced twenty-first century wildland-urban interface fire and urban conflagration into the international consciousness with a new urgency. The size and speed of it, combined with the scale of the evacuation (about 200,000 people), the structure loss (16,000+), the cost (likely over a hundred billion dollars when all is said and done), and the death toll (30) shocked the nation.

I happened to be in Orange Country when those fires broke out, and I did more media interviews than I've ever done in my life. Those fires, as intense and destructive as they were, were "out of season," implying that there is no longer a fixed "fire season," but rather "fire weather," which can now occur almost any time (see the hundreds of fires that burned across the Northeast last November).

That said, it's summertime now, and huge, stubborn fires are wreaking havoc in the heart of Canada, and across the American West. Particularly intense fires, burning in record-breaking temperatures, have been destroying property and also causing fatalities across the eastern Mediterranean.

Years - and in some places, decades - of prolonged drought have made many northern and western forests much more fire-prone. Milder winters, elevated summer heat, and year-round drought conditions have also enabled a variety of insects to kill or weaken vast swathes of forest, increasing flammability and transforming historic carbon sinks, like Canada's boreal forest, into net carbon emitters. Meanwhile, as highly flammable, petrochemical-heavy modern homes push deeper into the wildland-urban interface (WUI) in search of the "neighborhood in Nature" sweet spot, more and more structures are exposed to wildfire energy and embers.

As I've been learning on my now-global Fire Weather tour, communities are at very different stages of awareness and/or preparatory action, ranging from high (Hornby Island, BC; Steamboat Springs, CO) to low (Lucca, Italy; Cambridge, UK; Jaipur, India). Individuals have taken some of the messages from Fire Weather (and their own hard-won experience) to heart, abandoning synthetic (petroleum-based) clothes, gas-powered vehicles, and/or urging their town councils to build alternative routes out of their dead-end valley communities.

The biggest surprise is how fast it's happening, and how broadly. The petroleum industry, which is still insured, is destroying what was a very lucrative twentieth-century business: if you're an insurance company pulling coverage from vast swaths of the country, you may be reducing your exposure, but you're not making any money from policies either. You have to wonder if the industry is connecting these dots in a meaningful way . . .

Fire Wise (FireSmart in Canada) is a really good local program that operates through local fire departments. I think every local solution, from yard planting choices, to external sprinklers, to alternate escape routes, to fire preparedness guides can be scaled to policy level. What makes this hard and slow is that it requires a shift in consciousness and these, like attitudes toward litt...

Over the last eight years, a bipartisan coalition of Oregon lawmakers has led North America on a new trend: state-level zoning.

As zoning restrictions spread across the continent almost exactly 100 years ago, state and provincial governments mostly delegated to cities all decisions about where and what sorts of housing should be allowed locally. During the century that followed, that led to problems. A big one: cities and towns deployed zoning to gradually ban the rooming houses, duplexes, triplexes, and small-scale apartment buildings that had always been, until then, the places you could live when you had a small household or a tight budget.

At first, this wasn't an obvious problem. A city banning apartments might reason that inexpensive homes would still be legal in the next town over. Or they might observe that the next town over had offloaded its housing needs on them by banning apartments, so it was only fair that they do the same.

It was all very rational, and contagious. And after a century of local rules upon local rules, the state's largest city looked like a muddled patchwork of zoning.

The complexity of Portland's 779 distinct zoning categories, each one restrictive in its own ways and multiplied further across hundreds of other jurisdictions, has helped create a huge shortage of homes. That's especially true for the smaller and less expensive sorts of homes, since those are the ones most frequently banned by zoning. That housing shortage and the rising prices it drives have spiraled across city lines and ultimately left many thousands of people sleeping on couches, in parking lots, and in the woods.

Starting in 2017 and with rising confidence in each year since, Oregon has been responding to this endless civic buck-passing by rethinking its 100-year-old decision to leave the details of zoning mostly up to local jurisdictions.

Instead, much of the work on this statewide issue is now returning to the place it maybe should have always remained: the state.

To see how far Oregon's consensus has moved, read a bill Governor Tina Kotek signed today.

House Bill 2258 gives the state the power to override local zoning and allow any type of housing on standard urban lots.

I'll read that last sentence again.

The bill passed the state House 50-2, and the Senate 28-2. Kotek, its chief advocate, held a signing ceremony Monday for it and others.

Aurora Dziadul, a legislative and policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, said by email that her state agency plans to voluntarily apply "extra parameters" that narrow the scope of the program. But she said that yes, the bill does give the state the power to preemptively give zoning and building permit approval to any variety of housing project, from a backyard cottage to a skyscraper, on any lot that:

allows housing of at least one type;

falls within an urban growth boundary (a border that, in Oregon, defines the frontier between suburban and rural areas);

is between 1,500 and 20,000 square feet has no more than a 15 percent slope;

is outside areas officially designated as environmentally sensitive, naturally hazardous, containing significant natural resources, scenic, or open;

and is vacant, including from a recent demolition as long as it results in more homes.

A key phrase in the bill is in Section 4(2)a, which says that on such lots, the state may pre-approve only "attached or detached housing" - in other words, all housing. (That's one item in a list of qualifying factors that Dziadul said includes an implicit "or.")

It's unlikely that the state will decide to use this power to legalize 4-story apartment buildings on every urban lot, for example. If it did, cities would have a strong incentive to look for ways to nullify the law - for example, with tight new regulations on demolition. Until any previous building on the site has been demolished, it wouldn't qualify for the de facto state zoning code created by HB 2258.

Another issue: the staff...

You made it! The last contestant standing on an old-school game show. "Behind Door Number One" your charming host reveals, "a pile of rocks!" Behind Door Two, he grins, "a slightly larger pile of rocks!" And, gesturing to the last door with a glimmer of gold pouring out from beneath, "or will our lucky winner pick the million-dollar mystery prize?" It's a no-brainer. But as you reach for the knob, the host grabs your wrist. "What are you doing?" he hisses. "You're only allowed to pick between the first two doors!"

Hardly seems fair, does it. But municipalities in British Columbia get the same treatment when it comes to their local governments. The province strong-arms cities, towns, villages, and districts into using bloc voting to elect their councils, a poor fit for representation in local elections. Ward (or "district") voting, the only current alternative, appears a bit more generous but has its own weighty problems: spoiled elections and two-party dominance.

This year, as a special provincial committee studies election reform, might it finally come to pass that local governments get a glimpse behind that third door? Gold-standard elections, using the new best-in-class model now operational in Portland Oregon, are so close to being in reach: only a few lines of provincial law stand between municipal governments and better representation.

British Columbia's standing election laws simply don't give local councils a fair shot at better elections. Bloc voting and ward voting - the only two choices municipalities are allowed - are hardly ideal for representing voters.

Also known as plurality at-large voting, bloc voting is BC's default voting method for local councils. If 10 seats on the body are up for a bloc vote election, voters get to pick 10 candidates. The 10 winners are the ones with the most votes.

The problem?

In partisan contests, bloc voting often means the most popular party will win outsized representation on the council. Take the Vancouver City Council election of 1996 for example. The Non-Partisan Association (a center-right party, despite the name) won slightly more than 50 percent of the total vote, but took 100 percent of the seats.

By contrast, if voters had the same preferences under a proportional model, the Non-Partisan Association likely would have wound up with half of the seats, roughly equal to their vote share. Other parties - including the Coalition of Progressive Electors, Vancouver Organized Independent Civic Electors, and others - would have split the remaining five seats, giving their communities a voice in local government.

With turnout perpetually low in BC municipal elections, it's not out of the question that an extreme faction could seize control of most or all seats in a single election. As authors for Fair Vote Canada wrote in 2022, the winner-takes-all nature of council elections causes sudden and extreme policy swings, which can be expensive for taxpayers and create uncertainty for the individuals, communities, and businesses that local policies impact.

BC offers local governments only one alternative to bloc voting, which might provide slightly more accurate representation on a council, but creates headaches of its own.

Municipalities also have the option to elect councillors partially or entirely in districts, also known as wards. Wards that elect a single councillor operate under simple plurality rules (most-votes-wins), while multi-winner wards must use bloc voting. So far, only the District of Lake Country has adopted wards, but larger cities - including Burnaby, Surrey, and Vancouver - have debated or proposed converting to ward voting.

While wards guarantee geographic areas will have representation on a council, they create concerns for fairness and representation. First off: if wards split neighborhoods or communities between districts, those communities might not win representation at all, so local governments must take precautions to draw maps impartially and fairly. (The ac...

Pop quiz: What do Bruce Harrell and Lorena Gonzalez have in common? Hint: It's something they also share with both Tammy Morales and Tanya Woo, as well as Ann Davison and Nichole Thomas-Kennedy, Cathy Moore and ChrisTiana ObeySumner, Dan Strauss and Heidi Wills, and many others besides.

These candidates are mostly on opposite sides of Seattle's political spectrum. Each pair of competitors comprises one Seattle Times editorially endorsed candidate and one from the Stranger.

So what's the common denominator? Democracy Vouchers.

All these candidates (plus many more) took part in the city's innovative Democracy Voucher Program when they ran for office. Of the 42 eligible city candidates (for mayor, city council, or city attorney) who made it to the general election between 2017 and 2023, all but five used the program.

Only two non-democracy voucher candidates have won office over those years, and they also don't share a lot of overlapping political space: Sara Nelson, the council's current pro-business, anti-tax president, and prior socialist firebrand councilmember Kshama Sawant. Both Nelson and Sawant have expressed support for the program though, and have offered varied reasons for not participating. (For Nelson, concerns about door-knocking during COVID and other logistics; for Sawant, that opposing corporate PAC funds would swamp what she'd be allowed to spend as a democracy voucher candidate.

What does this mean for Seattle politics? Democracy vouchers are position-neutral, good for all kinds of candidates, and especially powerful for the voters of Seattle.

Seattle voters have a chance to renew this popular, fruitful, and inexpensive program on the ballot this August. In the words of Council President Nelson:

it's an "investment in democracy, the currency of your voice."

Seattle's elections are nonpartisan, so they don't exhibit the same type of partisan polarization that threatens to overwhelm current state and US federal elections. But the city still has political sides - moderate vs. progressive, centrist vs. lefty, preservationist vs. YIMBY.

Endorsements from the city's leading media outlets are a decent proxy for these lines of competition in Seattle politics. On one end is the Seattle Times, the city's moderate, largest news source. On the other side is the Stranger, Seattle's irreverent and unapologetically progressive alternative paper.

The Seattle Times and the Stranger have only endorsed the same general election candidate in one city race since 2017 (plus one other contest where the Seattle Times didn't choose a candidate). Every other time, they've supported opposite sides of the local political options. Politicos might wonder then, whether a program like democracy vouchers benefits one side more than another.

The answer? Nope!

Those political distinctions melt away when examining who has benefited from democracy vouchers. Seattle Times-endorsed candidates have won using the program. Stranger-endorsed candidates have won using the program. And the two candidates who gained office without the program are from opposite political camps. What's more, vouchers fund a similar portion of candidates' campaigns, making up 32 to 88 percent of contributions to Seattle Times candidates and 35 to 88 percent of contributions to Stranger candidates.

In 2023, all general election candidates used democracy vouchers. Mayor Bruce Harrell and councilmembers Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle all won with Seattle Times backing; Tammy Morales and Dan Strauss with a Stranger endorsement. In prior years the breakdown was inverted, and more Stranger-endorsed candidates have won; but they and their competitors have almost always also taken part in the voucher program. Even Ann Davison, who won election as Seattle's city attorney in 2021 while identifying as a Republican, used the program.

Instead of advantaging one political group over another, the program has benefited a more important stakeholder...

There's a reason most experience the thrill of whitewater rafting with a seasoned guide. Rivers have forks, twists, and turns, and it helps to have someone along who can navigate them. In a tumultuous time for politics in the United States, leading election reform in a place like Juneau Alaska, can feel much the same: it's exhilarating to be out front leading a movement, but there are certain routes you must know -Not- to take - lest you find yourself stuck in a hole or plunging off a cliff.

The Juneau Assembly recently shoved off on a quest to bring ranked choice voting to local elections. For one-winner races like picking a mayor or single assembly member, Juneau is sailing smoothly toward a tried-and-tested model that gives voters real choices and encourages candidates to work together. For Multi-winner contests, though, which include those for school board and the occasional two-person assembly race, the Assembly has steered toward a little-known variation: Cascade Voting, which can be as precipitous as its name implies.

The Cascade method might look from a distance to be a shortcut to the ultimate destination: fairer, more representative elections. But Australians, Mainers, and Utahns have explored the same passage and capsized or hastily reversed course, a sign of treacherous waters ahead. Luckily for Juneau, a better route is just a few paddle strokes away: single transferable vote, also known as proportional ranked-choice-voting, offers a safe and charted path forward.

Cascade voting (also known as "block preferential" or "multi-pass" voting) -looks- like ranked-choice-voting. It -sounds- like ranked choice voting. But instead of driving better governance and incentivizing more positive campaigns like ranked choice voting, the cascade method can distort election outcomes. Voters outside the mainstream can find their voices locked out of governing entirely. And in some cases, even candidates with majority support can lose their seats.

On the surface, Cascade voting appears to be little more than a version of ranked choice voting that elects multiple candidates (like three people to fill open seats on a local school board) rather than just one (like a legislator or mayor). Just as in a regular ranked contest, voters select candidates in order of preference. Once votes are in, officials eliminate the worst performers and transfer their votes to voters' next choices until someone wins a majority.

But it's after the first winner that the cascade model veers off course. To determine the winner of the second seat, election administrators count -all- the ballots again, ignoring rankings for the winner. Simply put, so long as they ranked their ballots, voters who elected the first-round winner get just as much weight in choosing the runner-up. The process repeats until there are enough winners to fill all of the seats up for election on the body in question.

While it may seem like a simple procedural tweak to accommodate multi-winner contests, Cascade voting can have disastrous consequences for representation. Since the same voters get to elect multiple candidates, votes tend to "trickle -up" to candidates who are most like the initial winner. Take Australia, for example, which once used the Cascade model for its senate. It almost always produced single-party delegation sweeps, over-representing the most popular party with no representation for anyone else.

At the local level, things got even worse. In Australian cities, minority parties figured out how to manipulate the process and prevent those in the majority from winning at all. It's no wonder, then, that one contemporary reformer called it a "blockhead system." In 1948, the country phased out Cascade voting.

Closer to home, few, if any, would recommend following the Cascade route. For example, in Utah, the city councils of both Payson and Vineyard opted out of cascade voting in 2025 after adopting it on a trial basis six years earlier. And while Portland Maine, used the...

With a miniscule portion of the city's budget, democracy vouchers deliver a whopping impact.

The program's funding is up for renewal this August, and it's a great deal. The renewal budget, $4.5 million per year in property taxes, is just 0.053 percent of the city's $8.5 billion 2025 budget. Renewal is an even smaller proportion of the budget than the original 2015 levy (which you also needed a magnifying glass to see).

That's a pretty amazing price for the program's benefits. I've already covered how democracy vouchers:

empower tens of thousands more residents to support local candidates they believe in;

cultivate a more representative donor pool;

reduce the flow of out-of-state and big-dollar donations;

and encourage more diverse candidates to run, connect with voters, and win office.

It's delivering real bang for the buck. The democracy voucher renewal cost can still be referred to as "budget dust," as was the original 2015 levy. What's more, that miniscule proportion of the total budget will continue to shrink as the city's budget grows (which it's done every year) and the levy rate stays constant. Over the course of its first nine years, the $3 million democracy voucher levy compressed from an already-tiny 0.059 percent of the 2016 city budget to 0.038 percent in 2024.

The Democracy Voucher Program is at least as worthwhile as many other similarly priced items in the city's 2025 budget. Among them are:

three months of public golf course maintenance and programs;

half of the annual funds for technology investments in construction and inspections;

fewer than three weeks of park maintenance;

eight weeks of debt service payments;

and four months of benefits management for retired employees.

What does the levy mean for individual property owners? The tax rate in the proposition is $2.27 per $1,000 of assessed value in the first year, representing an additional tax rate of $0.015 per $1,000 from the existing funding rate. That comes to about $13.07 per year for a median-priced house, according to the SEEC - about a $4 per year increase, or even less when accounting for inflation.

In other words, for an annual household cost less than the price of a single movie ticket, Seattleites can continue to reshape a fundamental part of their democracy.

In 2015, the Honest Elections campaign set the program funding levy at $3 million per year. That turned out to be a pretty good estimate of what it would take to launch and run democracy vouchers for Seattle, and it's kept the program solvent for its first ten years. Spending fluctuates year to year, of course (Seattle's elections are in odd-numbered years, so that's when the bulk of the costs come through), and unused funds from one year roll over to support costs in the next.

Administrators at the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), the entity that runs the program, estimated what it will take to fund another decade of democracy vouchers and determined that the program needs a slight increase from the past rate to keep going. With years of data behind them, they could better guess how to account for differing numbers of candidates and residents using the program.

It's true that a lot of Seattleites still don't use their vouchers, letting them languish on a forgotten shelf. But neither the original program designers (including Sightline) nor the SEEC expect 100 percent of Seattle residents to hand in vouchers; total participation is neither the program's success metric nor the budgeting baseline. They know that campaign finance reform is a tough nut to crack, and there will always be people who don't engage politically in that way.

Still, the current level of voucher dollars flowing in is impressive - enough to fund the bulk of participating candidates' campaigns and place Seattle as having one of the top, if not the highest, contributor rates of all US cities. What's more, most city candidates have opted into the program, just as the architects of the program hoped...

Critics of Seattle's democracy vouchers often point to one trend as evidence of the program's fallibility: a rise in local "independent expenditures." That is, dark money campaign funding vehicles like super PACs. Despite their upsides, critics say, vouchers have simply pushed millions of big-donor dollars from official campaigns into less transparent and accountable forms, rendering the program a waste of money.

Sightline led the design of the Democracy Voucher Program and has promoted and studied it for more than a decade. So, I wanted to check this accusation - and found it unwarranted.

Independent expenditures are up in many cities across the United States, democracy vouchers or not. And preliminary academic analysis controlling for other factors confirms the program has had no effect on this kind of outside spending.

Instead, Seattle's experience shows that this innovative public financing model is delivering on its promise of more people-powered elections - even if US laws hamstring the city's options for addressing every dark money dollar.

From the inception of the program, opponents raised fears of spending from outside groups - special interests not affiliated with official campaigns. The 2015 opposition statement against I-122 (the ballot initiative that created the program), for example, suggested that it, quote: "pushes more money into less accountable independent expenditures, which I-122 does nothing to limit or reform," end-quote. Recent news articles continue to reference the explosion of independent expenditures as the flip side of an otherwise markedly successful endeavor.

It's true that the city (and its voucher program) cannot limit this type of spending, although it can and has taken some steps to curtail or highlight certain offenders, such as banning foreign-influenced corporations from political spending and strengthening transparency and disclosure laws. Independent expenditures are dollars from interest groups that are explicitly prohibited from coordinating with candidate campaigns (hence the "independent" moniker). These entities can be political action committees (PACs), super PACs, or other "dark money" groups, which all have unlimited spending but different allowances on the funding they can accept.

The US Supreme Court prohibited limitations on such spending as far back as Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. It then kicked the door wide open for corporate spending in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, giving wealthy individuals and groups carte blanche to sway elections. And research shows that these funds do influence at least some policies.

It's also true that independent expenditures have risen in Seattle in recent years. But that doesn't mean they've grown because of the voucher program.

To test the allegation that the voucher program pushed political dollars out of official campaigns and into the "dark money" arena, Sightline turned to the leading independent US scholar of the program, Professor Jennifer Heerwig of SUNY-Stony Brook. Her research casts doubt on the claim, showing that independent expenditures have increased in many cities in recent years - some much more dramatically than in Seattle.

Independent expenditures, increasingly from ideological super PACs, have exploded in US politics over the past decade, including infiltrating local elections in the years directly following the 2010 Citizens United decision. Contributions to super PACs grew more than 30-fold from $40.1 million in 2012 to $1.3 billion in 2024, according to one report. According to another, spending doubled from 2020 to 2024 alone. Notably, these dollars are difficult to track, and reported figures likely under-estimate the growth.

Seattle and other nearby cities are not immune to this trend, nor is Seattle uniquely vulnerable to these outside campaigns. To study whether Seattle's independent expenditures increase bore any connection with the city's democracy vouchers, Professor Heerwig and researcher Anna Campbell collecte...

In 2023, Washington state legislators attempted to make it easier to build long-distance power lines. Recognizing that more wires are essential to reaching 100 percent clean electricity - and that, quote: "transmission projects take a decade or more to develop and permit" end-quote, lawmakers directed a state agency to preemptively analyze the environmental impact of these projects.

More specifically, legislators tasked the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (or EFSEC) with preparing a so-called "programmatic environmental impact statement" (or PEIS) for hypothetical large transmission lines. The PEIS's purpose is to evaluate possible environmental harms of transmission lines and identify ways to mitigate them before specific project proposals to facilitate more responsible and quicker project completion. Sightline supported the idea.

In March 2025, EFSEC dropped its draft assessment with a virtual thud. Spanning 1,083 pages, the PEIS catalogs dozens of possible impacts of transmission line projects, largely drawn from Washington's State Environmental Policy Act (or SEPA) rules. It is mind-bendingly comprehensive, assessing impacts ranging from the environmental (like soil erosion and habitat loss) to the economic (such as changes in home value) to the faintly absurd (for example "Physical Hazard to Aerial Recreation Enthusiasts").

EFSEC analyzed 72 impacts across three project phases (construction, operations and maintenance, and upgrades and maintenance) for both overhead and underground lines. To save you the math, that's 432 distinct assessments.

But nowhere in its 1,083 pages does the PEIS analyze how transmission lines would affect the biggest environmental issue of our day: climate change.

EFSEC isn't entirely to blame. The legislature directed the agency to focus on "significant adverse environmental impacts" of electric transmission facilities. Climate change does not obviously fit into this definition. (Though arguably, neither does aerial recreation.) And to be fair, the document does explain, in a two-page Purpose & Needs section, that "existing constraints on transmission capacity within the state already present challenges in ensuring adequate and affordable supplies of clean electricity."

But by failing to assess how expanding the grid would reduce climate pollution, these 1,083 pages leave decisionmakers without the full picture they need to weigh the trade-offs of critical clean energy infrastructure.

Even though the draft PEIS only tells half the story, it does offer one clear takeaway: stringing up wires can be, by and large, not hugely environmentally harmful, and most harms can be mitigated through careful planning, site selection, and design.

EFSEC rates each possible impact on a scale ranging from "nil" to "high." It then offers mitigation techniques that the agency says would bring the impact determination to a "less than significant level."

Before even applying mitigation measures, roughly a third of the total 432 assessments received a rating of "low," "nil," "negligible," or "not applicable." Public health and safety, recreation, energy and natural resources, and earth (such as soil erosion or compaction) are most likely to fall into this category. (Aerial recreation enthusiasts will be happy to know that they, too, land in this group.)

EFSEC also finds that with smart design and siting choices, most remaining possible impacts could be negligible or low. Two-thirds of the assessments received a rating with an impact range that includes low, nil, or negligible (for example: "low to high," or "negligible to moderate").

Of the 432 assessments, just four received a rating of at least "moderate" before mitigation. All four concerned Tribal cultural resources.

That tribal resources are the most likely to be affected by power lines makes another omission by EFSEC even more glaring than the climate one: the agency failed to consult with most Tribes before it released the draft PEIS.

The legislature e...

Six years after a monumental rezone, Governor Kotek's HB-2138 will fill the gaps to more fully legalize starter homes.

Almost six years after Oregon became the first state to re-legalize duplexes, fourplexes, and cottage clusters throughout urban areas, the effects have arrived.

From Gresham to Grants Pass, permits are being pulled, roof beams are rising, and first-time homebuyers are signing their closing papers. Policymakers in Oregon and elsewhere, meanwhile, have their own opportunity: learning lessons.

Oregon's 2019 state-level reform to low-density zoning turned out to be the leading edge of a wave that has since rolled to California, Maine, Vermont, Arizona, Washington, and Montana, with various cities initiating similar reforms in their own right. But through it all, some sympathetic analysts have asked: Is this reform actually worth the trouble? Is the juice worth the squeeze? And if it is, which details do we need to worry about getting right?

Well, the proof is in the permits. Oregon cities are now several years past the state's deadline for legalizing so-called "middle housing." And though it's still too soon to say exactly how big a deal these smaller home options will prove to be over the long term, the data suggests they do have potential. Most notably, within three years of legalization in Portland, they accounted for 26 percent of new residential units approved there.

Another lesson: The finer details of zoning reform definitely seem to matter. As Oregon lawmakers consider a new law, House Bill 2138, that would build on the state's 2019 bill, here are some of the takeaways so far from the outcomes of the first one.

1. Zoning reforms take time to pay off - but they can!

In a thoughtful 2024 law review article, housing advocate Brian Connolly succinctly named one of the key "structural roadblocks" to middle housing getting built: "the absence of a middle-housing building industry."

Connolly is right. You can't build a business on something that's illegal, and fourplexes have been illegal in most of North America for 70 years. Therefore, the middle-housing building industry is very small.

The good news is that in Portland, entrepreneurs have been changing that. It just took them a few years.

After a lackluster first year, production of newly legal homes in Portland quadrupled in years 2 and 3.

The year 3 total of 400 new homes per year isn't a lot in the context of a city with 300,000 homes. But, crucially, this rapid growth has been happening in Portland even in the face of a three percent population decline over four years and a huge slowdown in local apartment building. By year 3 after Portland's reforms, those 400 homes actually accounted for 26 percent of all housing permits citywide.

The main reason these homes are so popular even in a relatively cool market is probably that they have been able to come to market at much, much lower prices than homes on their own lots. The newly built middle housing homes average $300,000 less than single-detached houses:

What does it mean that this previously obscure category of the housing market has been able to grow so quickly amid a homebuilding slump? At least two things:

A lot of Portlanders would like to live in relatively small homes that are not in apartment buildings, but regulations previously prevented those homes from being built, so there was a lot of pent-up demand.

Even after Oregon re-legalized these homes, it took a few years for people in the industry to figure out how to build homes like that.

Eric Thompson, a former McMansion developer, told me in 2022 that he'd retooled his business away from building only for the richest five percent and was now signing deeds over to school-teachers and restaurant managers, people who never thought they'd be able to afford new construction. His firm, Oregon Homeworks, became one of the first to jump into this market and immediately started turning a profit. He said,

"For those of us in the know, Portland has the mo...