Skip to main content
Two city councilors representing opposite ends of Portland are crafting a plan to direct hundreds of millions of dollars to build sidewalks in their districts, where they are most scarce.
Councilor Loretta Smith, who represents District 1, which spans East Portland, and Councilor Mitch Green, who represents District 4, which includes all of the westside and a sliver of Southeast, are collaborating on the plan to find hundreds of millions of dollars to fund sidewalks in their districts.
The two councilors are looking at a variety of funding sources to cobble together enough money.
The four funding sources Green and Smith have been discussing are: issuing limited tax revenue bonds; directing money from the Portland Clean Energy Fund tax; obtaining state infrastructure grants; and seeking a federal grant from the Safe Streets and Roads for All Grant program, which in the next couple of years will dole out $2 billion to local initiatives for infrastructure aimed at reducing traffic deaths and injuries.
The SS4A application period for fiscal 2025 opens later this month.
Planning for the ambitious project is in its early stages, Smith and Green said in phone calls with WW. So is the discussion around which funding sources to pursue.
“Sidewalks are important, and we want to make sure that infrastructure in District 1 is a priority,” Smith says. “We need to go back to our book of business, and that’s infrastructure.”
Green says he’s open to using PCEF money for the project, but would prefer the bulk of it—if not all—coming from bonds.
“I’m amenable to a discussion around using PCEF dollars for active transportation infrastructure,” Green says. “But just stepping back, I’d prefer to have this as a bonding discussion.”
(The 2018 climate tax, which has brought in hundreds of millions more dollars than expected, was mined by the prior City Council to fill budget holes and to fund city projects tangentially related to climate resiliency. The current City Council is now in a robust debate about whether to use PCEF dollars to fill a portion of the $93 million hole in the general fund in the upcoming fiscal year.)
Green says he’d prefer to issue bonds. The city has headroom to issue bonds, either secured or unsecured, with the blessing of the City Council.
“We’ve got bonds that voters have previously authorized up to some level,” Green says. “It’s good, prudent practice for a chief financial officer to try and minimize its use. If you run up close to your limit, and you’ve got little reserves, you can risk losing a favorable credit rating, which makes your bonds more expensive in the future. That’s going to be part of the discussion with the Treasury.”
Green says that if the council decides to launch a smaller-scale pilot for the project costing, say, about $100 million, the city could issue unsecured bonds for that amount. Green says he’d prefer secured bonds if the amount is larger than $100 million at the outset.
Green and Smith’s idea is being hatched amid a budget cycle in which the city is facing a general fund budget hole of $93 million and an additional $60 million hole in non-general fund bureaus, including the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
As part of those budget discussions, some members of the City Council are advocating that the city tap into PCEF to fill budget holes. The Oregonian reported last week that various city officials are eyeing PCEF to fill various budget holes this year as the city is awash in unanticipated PCEF revenues.
Smith and Green currently plan to bring forward a resolution March 24 to the council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that would direct PBOT to prioritize sidewalk development in Districts 1 and 4. An ordinance in the following weeks would direct the City Budget Office and Treasury to explore funding options.
Should Smith and Green get funding for the plan, what the split would look like between Districts 1 and 4 is not yet clear.
Fifty-eight people died in traffic-related incidents last year; 27 of those deaths occurred in District 1. Twenty-two of those who died were pedestrians.
Nineteen people died in District 2; six died in District 4; and six died in District 3.
The 2024 numbers represented a modest decrease in traffic fatalities from the year before. In 2023, 69 people died in traffic-related crashes.