A Green New Deal for #OurPortland

Transcript

Announcer: [00:10] Welcome to our Portland with Sarah Iannarone, made possible by contributors to Friends of Sarah for Portland. Portlanders have everything we need to make radical progress today on emergencies like climate chaos, housing affordability, and staggering inequality. Each episode we'll hear how Sarah plans to be the mayor to lead the city of Portland to a more equitable and sustainable future. And now here's Sarah.

Sarah: [00:41] Welcome to the new Our Portland podcast. I'm Sarah Iannarone and I'm running to be Portland's next mayor. In this episode I'll give you a quick update from the campaign trail, talk about the local issues I've been paying attention to this week, dive deep into my Green New Deal policy, answer a few listener questions about it, and we won't forget our tweet of the week.

Sarah: [01:07] Well, it sure was a busy few weeks on the campaign trail. I went out to Unite Oregon's new offices in East Portland to film a video in support of refugees. It's been such a hard time for people in the United States under the Trump administration and I think Portland being a sanctuary city is so important. So I was happy to lend my voice to that effort and I thank them for their work on behalf of immigrant and refugee communities here in the city of Portland and in Oregon.

Sarah: [01:33] I stood with the workers of the Burgerville Workers Union at their picket line. Congratulations to them on ending that. I know there's still more negotiating to be done, but making sure that Portland's workers are making the wages that they need to live is so important. We can only work on the affordability equation so much. Making sure that our workers are earning the wages that provide the lives that they need is going to be something that we need to focus on as a community, so we need to be all in with our workers, especially when they're striking and picketing.

Sarah: [02:05] I was fortunate enough to attend the opening of a low income housing project Agape Village out at southeast 92nd and Powell, which was very important to me. I've been watching this project since its inception. It's a tiny home community, community led, faced a few challenges along the way, especially with regard to how much the city was going to charge them to come online and tap into city systems. I'm hoping that in the future when I'm mayor, we can figure out a way to reduce the barriers for people doing efforts like this. The pastor, especially at the Nazarene Church, has been very helpful and kind and compassionate toward Portland's homeless population and opened his church and his resources and his community to helping those folks all winter with the warming shelter inside the church. So having him open his property outside the church was particularly nice to see and I hope can see more of that, especially from the churches in Portland.

Announcer: [03:04] Please join Sarah for the first in a series of monthly Community Conversations about Our Portland: past, present, and future. This month, architect and placemaking expert, Mark Lakeman joins Sarah as they discuss civil society, the commons, and ways we can rethink and remake our city for a healthier democracy and more inclusive future. Join us Monday evening, November 11th at 6:30 at St. Philip Neri Church, 2408 SE 16th Ave, that's accessible by the number 10 and number 2 TriMet buses. Childcare and ASL interpretation are provided.

Sarah: [03:42] I took a little visit to the Portland Night Market, which is located right here by our offices in the central east side. The Sarah2020 campaign is hunkered down in the industrial sanctuary, looking for affordable commercial space alongside Portland's creatives and innovators. That Portland Night Market, wow, what a gem. It's so great to see our city lit up with people walking around visiting businesses, small businesses owned by Portlanders, by black Portlanders and Portlanders of color, making their way. So that's a great effort. That's actually funded and led in part by the City of Portland. Prosper Portland makes that possible. Great stuff.

Sarah: [04:24] I went down to the period day rally in Terry Shrunk Plaza. That put me outside my comfort zone. Not every politician spends their Saturday morning talking about their embarrassing period stories. I may be alone in that, in this race so far. To a large extent though, my periods have made me the person I am today. They've made me more courageous and more compassionate. And I know that most of you out there who mensturate, regardless of gender, probably have one or two horrifying period stories. So I'm right there with you in that building my courage day by day here on the campaign trail. So there was that. And I'll keep doing that courageous stuff, and probably sharing horrifying stories with you on this podcast. It's not easy, but we're in it to win it.

Sarah: [05:18] I went on a few community bike rides. One was with neighbors from Southwest Portland who showed me around their neighborhood and explained to me the challenges that they face. I know we talk a lot about transportation access, especially for active transportation and transit in East Portland, where there are many vulnerable populations for sure, but the residents of Southwest Portland, they're struggling too. Many of them would like to be able to take transit to work or walk their kids to school, but they really can't. Some of the folks we met with said we can't even get two, three, four blocks, just because there's no sidewalks and the cars are going so fast through our neighborhood. So we had some pretty intense talks about what we might be able to do to make that possible.

Sarah: [06:06] And this is going to throw us a little bit into the next segment of the podcast where I'm going to go through a few of the things in Portland politics from between podcasts (I keep wanting to say this week, but really it's a couple of weeks in between podcasts), to talk about news that I've seen and things that are on my mind. And one of the bike rides that I took this week was with an Oregonian columnist and it was the same day that there were two other crashes on Portland streets. And for those of you who follow me, you know that I'm a pretty intense advocate for Vision Zero, which is a goal that the city set out to reduce the number of fatalities and serious injuries that happen on Portland streets and traffic to zero. And so just so happened that I had been riding around town with an Oregonian columnist who reached out to me because they said, you know, we see you posting a lot on Twitter about feeling unsafe in traffic, I don't live where you live, how about you take me around and show me what your life is like as someone who gets around the city by bicycle and by transit. So we started out in Foster Powell and decided to commute into town and we ended up taking the Clinton street neighborhood greenway where later that evening I got a text from somebody saying, did you know that one of my bandmates had been injured very seriously on this bikeway? And then I saw the news and saw that not only had there been a cyclist who was injured on that greenway, but a pedestrian was also critically injured trying to cross the street on Sandy while they were in a crosswalk. And so for me, the fact that I had been doing that, learning tour earlier in the day and then to learn of those two crashes later in the night affected me deeply. Many of you know that I lost my neighbor to traffic violence earlier this year and it's made me an even more outspoken critic of our complacency with regard to street safety in Portland. So that's one of the things that I paid close attention to this week. And you can keep an eye on the Oregonian op-ed section for that piece. It should be coming out this week or next week.

Sarah: [08:25] Another piece of news: we learned about TriMet, our regional transit agency, hired nine new fare inspectors to crack down on what they're seeing, fare evasion, and in a public relations debacle, they put out a tweet, something to the effect of, Oh boy oh boy, can we relate, right? Like, we know all of you are feeling it. You get on TriMet and you see someone who didn't pay their fare and you're just like, whoa, why do I pay my fare and you don't pay your fare. And the backlash. I want to thank you Portland right now because Portland came strong against TriMet. They were insistent that no, when I ride transit, whether I've paid my fare or not paid my fare, whether I have a Hop Pass or an employer provided pass, I am not concerned with someone else who does not have fare. And also as I keenly pointed out, at least in my opinion, how do you even know if someone's paid their fare? You don't. You don't know if people have tapped their phones, you know if people are carrying a pass provided by their employer, you just don't know. So that was a public relations nightmare and I am so proud of my community for really calling that out because the things that we're talking about in this campaign really have to do with what does it mean for us to think about some of our biggest challenges in terms of getting people out of their automobiles. Not as some ideological mission, but because we really need to work hard on things like climate change. We really need to make sure that people have access to mobility. We really need to make sure that the suburbs and fringe areas are connected to the job centers and the education centers and we should be driving as many people on TriMet as possible. One of the things that I promoted in my Green New Deal, which we're going to talk about a little bit today, is fareless transit and what that would mean for us as a community. There's going to be a lot of back and forth on this. You're going to have people coming at us with numbers and arguments, but ultimately what it comes down to is us as a society saying we value people having mobility, and that day when the community pushed back on TriMet, I really saw that. So it lets me know that we're on the right track.

Sarah: [10:59] And that my friends, leads us to the Tweet of the Week, which is something we've come up with. You all know I'm pretty active on Twitter. I think it's a great platform for people who may not otherwise have big channels to grow them. It also helps me listen to you directly. I do my best to communicate with you respectfully (not everyone's respectful toward me, but I really do try to be respectful toward you), and to share ideas. And we really do have disagreements on there, but we work really hard to be respectful toward each other. So Tweet of the Week is where I pick my favorite tweet from somebody who let me know that they were connecting with something I had to say or an issue that was important to me. This is by no means an endorsement of that individual or their general opinions writ large, it's merely an endorsement of that tweet. So here's the Tweet of the Week. It's by someone who goes by at @zak_lmao. zak lmao the tiny viking, this one's for you. TriMet is hiring nine new cops. (insert caveat, they're actually just fare inspectors, but) TriMet is hiring nine new cops to perform unconstitutional fare checks, ones that have historically routinely targeted lower income brackets. @sarahforpdx is running for mayor of Portland and supports a fair, free TriMet. Today I skipped my fare and donated it to Sarah2020 instead. Thank you for your contribution, zak lmao the tiny viking, and thank you for your amazing tweet and commentary.

Sarah: [12:37] So switching gears a little bit, what inspired us to do this podcast, as affable as I may be and interesting with my day to day life on the campaign trail, it's really, when it comes right down to it about policies, right? What is going to make Sarah the person to lead our city at this critical time? And one of the things that sets me apart is my policy acumen. I've spent the last 10 years working with cities from around the world who come to Portland to exchange policies and best practices with our experts. And what I've learned from those conversations with them is that Portland is doing a lot of things very, very well. We have a lot of ways where we're in front of the game, right? So the question that I continue to ask is why are we then flat lined on so many things where we can be doing so much better. And part of me running for mayor is about saying, Hey, we have all of the knowledge we need, we have the technical expertise, we have the innovation, we have the money, and we're going to talk about this a little bit, so why aren't we doing better? And in this part of the podcast we're going to take some policy deep dives as I release policies out of the campaign so we can unpack those a little bit. What is my thinking behind some of the things I'm trying to do? What are some of the questions I've heard from people as I'm out at meet and greets or house parties or public appearances or even online. And we're going to take some of your questions that you submit on those policies. So the first one that we're going to dive into, because I've already released it, is the green new deal. But there will be other policies coming out. They'll be coming out about once a month as we release them. The next one that's gonna come out after Green New Deal is going to be Rethinking Public Safety. We're going to talk a lot about what it means to keep people safe in Portland, but for this one, we're going to dive into the Green New Deal, which for those of you who haven't seen it, you may want to pause the podcast here and go to sarah2020.com/greennewdeal. I'll say it for you one more time, sarah2020.com/greennewdeal. And go check it out for a minute. It's not a, here's a whole lot of fancy words around what we're going to do as a climate leader city, right? But it's about here are the ideas from cities around the world, from thought leaders around the world, from scholars and experts and community organizations who are trying new things on the frontline of the climate crisis around what it's going to take for us to realize a truly sustainable future. We'll take your listener questions on this green new deal and other policies using the #OurPortland hashtag. So you can comment on Facebook @sarahforpdx is our handle on Facebook and Instagram, and on Twitter it's @Sarah2020. You can go to sarah2020.com and sign up for our mailing list there. You can send us an email, [email protected]. You can do that in writing or you can just drop us a voice memo. And I think between now and when the next podcast drops, we'll have a phone number for you to call where you can leave those messages too. But for now, just use those channels and we'll get into it.

Sarah: [16:05] So what does it mean, you know, thinking about the green new deal, we've heard a lot of talk at the federal level about a Green New Deal. AOC is a big proponent of this. We hear candidates, especially on the democratic side, talking about what a Green New Deal for our country would look like. But what does it mean for a municipality? It's something that you have to think carefully about. And there's only so much that's under the mayor's purview. There's only so much that's under the city council's purview. So what can we do as a city, as the city of Portland, to call ourself a leader in climate action and not have that be a false statement for a good long time. We've touted our legacy of green leadership to the world, but we're falling short of our carbon reduction targets, and in fact Portland's carbon emissions are rising. And one of the things that's aggravating to me is that's not how it should be here. If you're a city that calls itself a climate leader, then you need to hold the course when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. And the way that I believe that we're going to do this is not from a top down perspective where you have a singular entity in a particular position inside City Hall who says, let's ban straws, but let's act with urgency and partner with our frontline communities who are living the reality of what climate change is as it is happening, looks and feels like, and tap into their knowledge, tap into their resources, tap into their lived experience, into their power for innovating practical responses that are appropriate in time and place to people who need them most. As Portlanders I do believe that we have a responsibility to do better. I think it's important that we stop talking talk and start walking walk, and you'll hear me saying that again and again. We talk an awful lot about how awesome we are here. We wear our exceptionalism like a comfy Pendleton blanket on a cold autumn evening, but then when it comes time to have those really hard conversations, I think we just get challenged by it. And in fact, that's one reason why I'm thankful for the Open and Accountable Elections program in which I'm partnering right now with the city of Portland. We can't accept tepid leadership and centrist incrementalism if we're going to stave off ecological collapse. And one of the reasons that I believe that our politicians haven't had the courage to say the things that need to be said and follow them up with real action is because of how campaigns are financed. As a publicly financed candidate in the city's new Open and Accountable Elections program, I'm accepting contributions of between $5 and $250 from mostly Portlanders, and those contributions are being matched up to the first $50 by a public fund. And out of that public fund comes a good bit of money to my campaign that amplifies and elevates the voices of real Portlanders. This means that someone who gives me $5, their contribution is $35 to the Sarah2020 campaign effort. And so when I'm talking about some of these things in the Green New Deal that we haven't heard from people running for local office before, it's in part because of this public financing. I can talk to transit dependent Portlanders who say, Sarah, I live in East Portland. I work after midnight at the Moda Center, or I work, you know, third shift out in Hillsboro and I can't not drive there. What are you going to do? You talk an awful lot about we need to get people out of their cars, but I need my car and I want people to know, I understand that, and what I'm talking about is holistic systemic transformation to systems that we have constructed over decades and even a century that we need to come together and find new ways of deconstructing those systems and building up new systems that will help us realize a better future for Portlanders. But I also assume a great amount of responsibility for our global leadership position in this effort. Like it or not, Portland is a global leader in many respects. People do look to us for policies and best practices about making cities that are really good. How can we be like you? And so if we're passing along less than optimal policies, if we're saying it's okay to paint sharrows on the road and call that cycling infrastructure, it's okay to have fare enforcement while low income people go without access to transit, it's okay that your neighbors are sleeping on the streets, then we're not actually leading in ways we should. So my team met with a lot of community members over the last few months while we were building up this campaign and I've personally been meeting and talking with people for years about this. What does it mean for us to reestablish our global climate leadership not as a branding exercise, but because our future depends on it. We need to rethink how we invest in jobs, in education, and infrastructure, and what kind of leadership do we want to get us there? How can we ensure that our communities are prosperous and equitable? How are we going to ensure that our environment is healthy and habitable? These are the questions I sit here in the central East side as the bomb trains roll past my windows all day, every day (and I apologize if at a certain point we have to pause, pause the podcast because you hear the train whistles, but they come by pretty frequently).

Sarah: [22:37] A lot of times when I'm talking about policy, people want me to give them hyper specifics, but until I'm in office, I don't know the landscape. I don't know who's going to be elected to city council. I don't know what our budget reality is. We could have an earthquake between now and the time I'm elected mayor. So what I have to call what I'm laying out is a roadmap, right? It's how I see us getting to a future-ready Portland. But I can't promise that this is how we're going to get there. And I think that's important too. We need to hold our electeds accountable to their words. And a lot of times during a campaign you get a lot of campaign promises, right? I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. I think what's important for me to say to the public right now is if we're thinking about new leadership models and new governance styles, that the future isn't about empty promises. What it's about is a commitment to the public to lead from a particular set of values and using a particular set of methods and based on a particular set of goals. And what we need to do is act with urgency. So one of the first things that's in my roadmap for the Green New Deal is to declare a climate emergency and act with urgency. Hundreds of cities around the world have done this. The fact that Portland has not done this makes my brain hurt. I don't even understand how this can be. And I see that as a leadership problem. We know that the environmental movement here is strong, and so we need to look at a climate action test for our policy and reset our targets and think about how are we going to measure and implement what we're doing. We need whole new sets of measures. We have a world-class planning bureau, and somehow we've managed to increase our emissions. We may not be measuring the right things and may not be focusing on what we need to be focusing on because what you measure is what you'll get. So we need to be thinking carefully about what we're measuring and how, so that our measures reflect our values and goals as a community. And we talk an awful lot in Portland about equity and inclusion. But then when you look at someone's policy proposals, there's point A and point B and C and D and E and F and G, and then you get to H and I and O, there's inclusion right at the bottom of the policy agenda time after time, and ultimately at the bottom of the budget. And so what we're going to do is partner with frontline communities to lead on Portland's transition. This is an aboutface from what we're doing right now, which is consulting with frontline communities, listening to what they have to say, doing it sometimes when a particular bureaucrat is disposed or particular elected is disposed to this community or that community. But we have not figured out a way to shift power from local government and the mainstream environmental organizations directly to the frontline communities. And so we need to convene a summit, I believe, to get our community members in those seats, in positions of power where they can talk about how this would look for them and then come up with ways to fund them directly. This isn't about increasing the budget. This is about shifting money from ways that we currently spend it and who we value as the expert on these things to make sure that the research for which we're already paying for, the development, the planning, the programming, the policy evaluation that ostensibly is going on inside of our bureaus, that we're actually working with and supporting communities and shaping these policies. And I think that one way that we're gonna make this possible is through more participatory budgeting. You know, we've seen successes, especially out of Seattle in terms of how we align community priorities with spending. And I think that that's something that we can do in Portland too. And so a more holistic systems thinking approach to this. In terms of green jobs, restorative justices and how we prosper even as we transform our society and economy to be more sustainable is definitely gonna need to come out of our partnerships with frontline communities. And then ultimately it's about drawing that line in the sand, right? Like we need leadership with the courage to say yes, we're going to be net zero by 2030 because there is no planet B. I've been listening an awful lot to the young people and I've been listening to an awful lot to our more entrenched environmental organizations, and what I hear them saying is we need to prohibit new fossil fuel infrastructure. I was at the hearings to oppose the Zenith petroleum terminal expansion and I've been active in opposing the expansion of the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway project too. We need to not be talking about the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. We need to be talking about the managed rapid decline of fossil fuel infrastructure. And then we need to focus on accelerating our investments in renewable energy. We know we have green building capacity here. We need to revive that capacity. We need to revive that ambition. We need to revive the actualization of things like green roofs and retrofitting buildings for seismic sustainability, and ultimately we know that in addition to building energy use, transportation is about 40% of our emissions in the state right now. So again, I know they say, Sarah, why do you hate cars? And in fact, I don't. I actually think some cars are pretty cool, but what I hate is not having a planet to live on. And so thinking about how we can transform our systems so that Portlanders can access transit where and when they need it, get them the coverage they need, get them the e-bikes that will get them places where there isn't transit. Making sure that when there is transit on the road, it's not stuck in traffic and making sure that we have the infrastructure so that if we can get people to opt into a different choice besides driving alone, and then that safe for them and they don't have to worry that they're going to end up like those folks I talked about earlier who were seriously injured because they were walking or riding a bicycle.

Sarah: [29:22] There are some things, you know, nuts and bolts that we're gonna have to talk about because how are you going to make this happen, Sarah? And they say, how will you pay for it? Well, part of it is right now we bond a lot for our future. And so what would it mean for us as a community to have a publicly owned municipal bank so that we could keep the hard money that we, the hard earned money that we invest here circulating locally, it would decrease our borrowing costs, help us ensure that profits from our investments at home aren't negated by fossil fuel investments elsewhere. I just think it's folly to think that we can finance our future by sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Wall Street banks who have for so long opposed and undermined our values and that we're going to succeed that way. We need to be thinking more progressively about taxation. Large companies and the wealthy need to pay their fair share. I'm a huge booster of the Portland Clean Energy Fund and I find it almost offensive that there are people who stood against it who call themselves climate leaders in our city. This is one of the most innovative municipal climate policies led by frontline communities that I've seen evidence of. And so we need to make sure that corporations aren't exempt from that, steward, that so that it's durable for the long term, and make sure that those community organizations are empowered to leverage the funds for community benefit. And this is all about workers really. Cause this means where are we spending our precious dollars and who's benefiting from that? I think that making sure that we have a focus on the green jobs and a focus on equity and public works investments so that with every investment we are making, we're ensuring that those benefits accrue to Portlanders foremost, is going to be at the center of our Green New Deal. And when it comes right down to it, I'm a pretty thrifty person. I live a really nice life without a lot of money. And in part, that's because of the things that are made possible here for me in Portland. But when you think about it, I know this isn't going to be made possible by technology. Huge. Um, everyone says, think about the EV or think about the smart cities (EV being electric vehicles. I'll try to keep my jargon to a minimum), but really one of the smartest things that we can do is focus on what we already know how to do, which is create low carbon neighborhoods. Can we get that? Can we get them online, efficiently, affordably, streamline the development of compact, walkable neighborhoods connected by transit? Can we build out zero emission zones or low emission zones in critical areas around the city where young people are gathering? Transit corridors, town centers, parks and schools. Can we rethink our streets so that the options besides driving alone are reliable, affordable, and safe for our residents? I mean, think about the golf courses. We have these huge swaths of the city covered by a land use that only a few people are even availing themselves of and which could be housing a lot of people very affordably, while maintaining that we had habitat and other amenities there that people value. So a lot of these things are at the heart of what we're trying to do. I know it's a lot. It'll always be a lot when we're talking policy. It's what I do. I'm a policy wonk. But really the question is what do you think about Portland's Green New Deal and how does that resonate with you?

Sarah: [33:05] So we're going to turn to a question that was submitted to the [email protected] email by Catie:

Question: [33:20] In your Green New Deal policy there were a couple of points about giving frontline communities and the public more power over planning and decision making. I've been to a lot of public meetings and I know that who shows up isn't representative of the neighborhood. Also more public processes seem to result in very slow projects that get stuck in the design phase for years. We need to act really fast. So what is a better public process look like?

Sarah: [33:45] That's a great question, Catie. What does a better public process look like? And in fact we're going to be releasing a policy probably into 2020 around good governance and a healthy civil society and what it means to repair the frayed fabric of our communities. And this is a part of it, right? What does it mean when certain outsized voices shape outcomes over time? That status quo starts to internalize the sense that it is the moderate option. It is the norm. It is the way things should be. That's how dominant culture works and what it means for us to turn that on its head somewhat means that what we set as a baseline for public process is going to need to change. In some ways, it may mean having the courage to go into a community where changes are happening and saying, here are the changes that are going to be happening. We do need to bring down emissions. We do need to do that by retrofitting buildings, by reducing the number of miles people travel by automobile. The question is not whether we do those things, but how. And it also means having an honest conversation about tradeoffs. We often times, not just in Portland but I think it's just human but particularly important in Portland, we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to be a green leader but we don't want to give up certain luxuries. We want to be a green leader but we don't want to undertake the challenging work of taxing the rich. We saw that blow back with the Portland Clean Energy Fund from the incumbent and from the Portland Business Alliance in terms of opposing a Portland Clean Energy Fund. Rather than saying, okay, we're with you, we may be skeptical of this, but we're going to listen to you and learn from you and then here are the feedback loops that we are going to create so that we know whether or not it's working because a lot of what that NIMBY impulse is, right (for those of you who don't know, and I will probably use that term a lot on this podcast, NIMBY means not in my backyard), and it's the impulse of, it's a very liberal impulse of that may be a good thing, right? Like putting a homeless shelter is a really good thing, as long as you don't put it by my house. Right? Or even those wind turbines are really nice, as long as I can't see them from my front yard. Or I support density, but just could you please not block my view with that density? And we need to have systems that say we're hearing you, but also that don't cater to the NIMBYism that is so pervasive here in which people think that they are entitled to certain things like a particular view or a particular free parking space in front of their house to which they're actually not entitled. And so it's about having honest conversations and that's gonna take leadership. But I believe that we've got it in us.

Sarah: [37:15] It may sound daunting and we go deep on a lot of problems that Portland's facing. That's the premise of the podcast, that we're not going to have superficial answers to challenges that aren't the least bit superficial. These are existential things with which we're grappling, right? So what does it mean for us as a community to engage in this work that we have before us with a sense of hope, with a sense of can-do-it-ness, with a sense of come together and make this happen. And I have a term that I've been using and I've been using it for a little over a year now, maybe more, and I call it tactical optimism. And when people say, Sarah, what do you mean by tactical optimism? What I'm talking about is this sense that we first of all have everything that we need to solve our problems today. We can harness our resources, come together as a community and work on these challenges as an opportunity. We will be better as a community, as a society, as a species through the doing of this work. There's not some ideal out there waiting for us on the other side of this. This opportunity to engage in work like the Green New Deal that I'm proposing is precisely where we need to go. And that is a tactic that is a way of changing how we do things. It's how we're going to adjust to the new dynamic world in which we're living. And this is not just a procedural or technical approach, but it's a mindset in terms of the philosophy that we're going to adopt as we move forward. So tactical optimism is both a process by which we'll do things, but it's a philosophy by which we're going to live. We are going to say that as a community by coming together and engaging in this work with steady enthusiasm, joyfulness for the opportunity to engage with each other in this work, gratitude for the work and for each other, that we can then cultivate a mindset of optimism for the future. Because what choice do we have? We are facing some challenges that are so daunting. So by embracing something like tactical optimism whereby we embrace the work ahead of us, connect with each other in doing it and stay positive about the future. I believe we're going to make this happen. And with that I hear the trains coming through. I think it's time to wrap up this podcast. So, we'll see you next time.

Announcer: [40:13] Thanks for listening to Our Portland. If you have a question for Sarah, record a voice memo on your phone and email it to [email protected] or use the #OurPortland hashtag and send us a message on social media. If you appreciate a campaign with straight talk on issues that matter, consider signing up to be a monthly supporter of $5, $10, or even $35, between now and election day in May, 2020. Find out more at sarah2020.com. And here's a reminder to vote in the Multnomah County special election. Election day is November 5th and Thursday, October 31st is the last day to safely mail your ballot. After Halloween, please use an official drop site. This has been a production of Friends of Sarah for Portland.