Ensuring Equitable Access to Opportunities

We shared the results of the Regional Equity Atlas with thousands of grassroots leaders and elected officials. We launched the website, www.equityatlas.org, and completed the Regional Equity Action Agenda, which serves as our collective platform for improving equity conditions in the region. Through this work, we have also become a key advisor for elected officials, academics, business and non-profit leaders on equity planning research and implementation tools. Two on-the- ground equity accomplishments include:

Colwood Golf Course – A Victory for Open-Space Preservation & Equity
Advocacy efforts by a coalition of neighborhood, housing and conservation groups, including CLF, resulted in a unanimous vote by the Portland City Council to preserve 140-acres of open space. The preservation of this rare and vital open-space and upland habitat offers a rare opportunity to restore nature to one of the City’s most park deficient areas, as well as protect the Columbia Slough and surrounding areas.

Renaturing Low-Income Communities
Metro’s Nature in Neighborhood Capital Grant program - created by the 2006 Greenspaces Bond Measure as a result of CLF’s advocacy - awarded its first three grants. All three projects that were awarded funding serve low-income communities. The Hawthorne Grove Project in Clackamas County’s Southgate neigborhood, unites affordable housing with the creation of a new pocket park, and was initiated as a direct result of outreach by CLF and Portland Audubon.

From Cars to People - Shifting the Balance in Regional Transportation

CLF advanced a new approach to the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) that aims to dramatically refocus the direction of investments and choices by prioritizing people, not cars and trucks. This year, in determining how to measure the performance of possible transportation projects, Metro had begun moving away from adopted goals for equity and sustainability. Instead they were emphasizing traditional auto-centric measures. CLF successfully reversed this trend, ensuring that the focus on health, equity, environmental protection, and global warming when determining transportation investments was maintained.

Climate Smart Columbia River Crossing

CLF crafted a “Climate Smart” vision for the CRC, using it to galvanize community support and dramatically shift the debate around the project. The Climate Smart CRC vision proposes that the CRC must reduce global warming pollution to conform with Oregon’s and Washington’s climate change goals rather than including a 12-lane bridge that encourages people to drive more. We had several significant successes related to the project, including:

• Through media and outreach, we successfully changed the public discourse about the project from discussing the project as unequivocally good, to discussing what kind of project would serve our regional goals, including those for climate change, public health, and equity.
• The public controversy has caused state and federal elected officials to publicly question the political will to fund the project.
• Multnomah County Health Department undertook the region’s first Health Impact Assessment for a transportation project, bringing public agency criticism to the project and increasing the focus on the project’s impacts on community health.
• The Portland City Council and Metro Council decisions on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement did not agree to a mega-bridge design, and included extensive conditions consistent with CLF’s Climate Smart CRC proposal that must be in place before supporting a final project.
• The project undertook one of the nation’s first analyses of greenhouse gas in a federal environmental review.