Andrea Damewood is a Portland-based writer. Follow her on Twitter @adamewood.

Thousands of Portlanders lined up this week to be among the first to traverse the Tillikum Crossing, the city’s newest bridge over the Willamette River, Nike shoes tapping impatiently in a late summer heatwave. The bridge’s white steel cables cascade down from two high peaks over the glittering blue water, forming an architectural homage to the glacier snow-topped summit of Mount Hood to the East.

The Tillikum Crossing, named for a Chinook word for family and tribe, is yet another eco-first for Portland, a city whose name is international shorthand for sustainability: the $1.49 billion span is the first in the nation to allow pedestrians, bicyclists, light rail and buses, but to completely ban individual motor vehicles.


The usual cast of luminaries were among the first across the bridge, which also facilitated the creation of a new light rail line that runs to a suburb southeast of the city. Among them was Portland Mayor Charlie Hales. He grinned at the opening of the Tillikum with his bike and his wife Nancy, both in locally-made Nutcase helmets, and posted a tweet boasting: “#PDX cont to lead in sustainable development!”

Hales runs America’s most environmentally friendly city, and from the outside the first-term mayor might appear that he’s been a huge success: He has spent the summer evangelizing about his hometown internationally, jetting to the Vatican for Pope Francis’s historic encyclical on climate change and to the White House for the unveiling of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Hales was among just 60 mayors worldwide asked to the Vatican, where he networked and discussed with other dignitaries how to battle climate change at a local level. “That was a very moving experience: to have this defined as a moral issue as well as a political issue,” Hales said of his meeting with the Pope. “This connection was like the touch on the Sistine Chapel, of climate and human suffering…it’s a revelation to me.”

But back home, despite their mayor’s international celebrity, Portland residents—many of whom have chosen this city because of its reputation as a place where sprawl is a four-letter word and skies remain smog free—are increasingly voicing concerns that their green city is losing its pride of place. Where once Portland easily claimed the mantle as the greenest city, it now faces increasingly crowded competition from other U.S. cities pushing sustainability, even as climate change initiatives continue to stall at the national level. “Now more than ever we need leadership from City Hall that this is how we roll, this is how we do things we’re building a different kind of city, and he just hasn’t done that at all,” says Jonathan Maus, editor and publisher of the influential BikePortland.org, a hybrid bicycle news site.

“There is a consensus that we have been resting on our laurels and lacking leadership,” says Andy Maggi, director of the Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club. “If we’re going to be leaders and move these issues forward, our leaders need to have that vision.”

For decades, Portland had a vision: Long before green issues and sustainability became a national buzzword, the Pacific Northwest city of 600,000 had seemed to speed past other U.S. cities on solar-powered jet engines when it comes to environmental issues: In the 1970s the city ripped out a highway along the river and replaced it with a 36-acre park, and in 1993 it was the first major U.S. city to enact a plan to reduce carbon emissions. Portland’s light rail system, known as the MAX, became a model for other cities, and progressive bicycle policies have nudged the city’s bike commute rate to 7.2 percent percent, the highest in the nation.

In Portland, merely having one of the highest rates of recycling in the country isn’t enough: New Seasons, a local grocery store, offers free recycling of clamshells and other non bin-friendly items; a restaurant can barely get off the ground if it isn’t farm-to-table; and even the Portland Trail Blazers run promotions where sponsors plant three trees for every three-pointer the team sinks on the court. As a result of the ethos, the city’s also become a magnet for renewable energy businesses, sustainability companies and eco-friendly entrepreneurs; it’s a lot sexier to say you’re in the green business and from Portland, than, say, Cincinnati.

Hales, for his part, says he smiles every time he hears “handwringing” that Portland is falling behind in any way. “I love it that we’re in a virtuous competition with other cities about saving the planet and making their cities more livable,” he says. “What a problem to have that we’re in that race and we’re the first seed in that race.”

But with Hales in his third year as mayor, many environmentalists in his backyard don’t feel the city is in first place anymore. Critics say Hales is coasting on the work of his predecessors and has done little to push new policies in his own administration. They say Hales has failed to be attentive to stop fossil fuel export projects and done little himself to advance alternative transportation.

“Hales hasn’t been a firebrand for these issues that Portland holds dear, but he’s certainly gone to tons of photo ops and parties for these things,” Maus says. “What has he done to really capitalize on those values in Portland and to push stuff forward?”

This spring the mayor’s office was flooded with thousands of calls and emails when he nearly allowed the Pembina Pipeline Corporation to build a massive propane storage and export terminal in city limits. Hales killed the deal only after the public outcry (and shortly after his campaign conducted polling). And in July, hundreds of “kayaktivists” flooded the Willamette River and Greenpeace activists dangled from a bridge above in an attempt to stop the departure of a Shell vessel that had docked in Portland for repairs before its departure for an exploratory oil-drilling mission in the Arctic.

Where once Portland saw its sustainability initiatives setting it apart nationally, it now sees a crowded field of urban areas outpacing it. Other major cities are funneling far more resources into fighting climate change right now than Portland. Denver has three light rail lines in construction simultaneously, while Portland’s opened a new line every five or so years. Chicago and New York are pouring millions into bike share programs and emulating Copenhagen’s famous separated bicycle greenways. And it was Minneapolis, not Portland, that was named the only American city among the world’s top 20 cycling cities in June by Copenhagen Design Company, a bicycle-focused urban design consultancy that advises cities and governments on infrastructure.



“Portland’s earlier and better at it, but other places are catching on and catching up,” says David Bragdon, a former Portland elected official who now runs TransitCenter, a nonprofit that pushes for public transport innovation and policies in Brooklyn. “There’s a reputation in Portland for being green for sure, but it doesn’t last forever.”

Deserved or not, the perception that Hales—who in nearly any other city would be seen as a tree-hugging green freak—hasn’t done enough to advance the city’s green agenda is dogging the first-term mayor. “It’s got to be something you care about from day one and spend your entire administration trying to make action on,” Maus says. “We’re not going to reach our goals—our climate change goals, our transportation goals—bicycling has flatlined in Portland. You’re not going to get your climate change in check unless you get people out of their cars.”

Hales, 59, took office in 2013 on the heels of Mayor Sam Adams, whose entire administration was tainted by a scandal involving his sexual relationship with a barely 18-year-old boy prior to taking office. Adams was behind the construction of bicycle greenways, curbside composting, securing millions in carbon reduction grants and banning plastic bags, but the public mistrust and manic quality to his administration left voters sour on Adams’s brand of politics. Hales, whose background includes work with a consultancy company that helped sell cities on streetcars, painted himself as the anti-Adams: a no-nonsense pragmatist who would get the job done.

Hales says that he had to spend his first few years fixing the mess that was left for him—work that didn’t leave him with time to address climate issues. “For the first two to three years of my administration, we had a great deal of repair work to do: We had the biggest budget deficit in the history of the city and a police bureau that needed significant cultural change,” he says. “I love transit, I love planning and I can wonk out all day long on those issues. I didn’t have the luxury to spend much time on those issues when I was bailing out the boat.”

Hales has struggled to connect with the city’s green constituency. While Adams never missed an opportunity to be seen on his bike or out driving a Prius, Hales drew chuckles last month when he turned his very first bike commute to City Hall from his Southeast Portland home into a photo-op. (He drew further snark from cyclists when he was photographed locking his Trek with a cable lock instead of a U-lock, which experienced Portland bicyclists know amounts to basically tying a bow on a gift to thieves).

The appearance of his weakness on green issues is one reason he’s drawn a strong challenger in the 2016 mayoral race from state treasurer and former Multnomah County Chairman Ted Wheeler. Wheeler vows to advance initiatives—especially bicycling infrastructure—that he says have stalled under Hales. “I don’t see [sustainability] as an issue, I see it as an imperative,” says Wheeler, who has already met with bicycle advocates and is making greenway investments an initial campaign platform. “That’s the gold standard. Other cities have invested heavily in that and Portland has fallen behind, and I think Portland would like to get back into the lead in sustainability movement.”

The city, where campaign flyers are just as likely to feature a candidate wearing a bike helmet as it is to show them reading to school children, seems locked into a mayoral race where both men will spend the next year attempting to prove they’re the greenest candidate and thus deserve the third-floor mayor’s office at Portland’s City Hall, with its MAX stop around the corner and a permaculture vegetable garden out front.

In recent months, Hales is starting to show signs of moving climate change more to the fore, pushing through an updated climate change plan that vows to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent. This June, the city council passed an updated Climate Action Plan, an update to the pioneering document adopted more than 20 years ago when Hales voted for it as a city commissioner. It’s a sprawling document (the summary alone is 44 pages). Among the dozens of goals: promises to cut the city’s carbon output by 80 percent by 2050; pursue green bonds to finance infrastructure projects that have positive environmental impacts and encourage environmental best practices in capital projects; disinvest the city’s money from fossil fuels, retrofit city buildings with solar panels to generate more than 2 million kilowatt hours of energy, convert the city’s fleet of vehicles to electric and require major buildings over 20,000 square feet to report their energy use to the city.

Beyond those ambitious plans, Hales says that next week, in the wake of the Pembina debacle, he will be introducing a Fossil Fuel Export Plan to decide if the city should permit the export of any fossil fuels at all. “We had this big wave of revulsion about the Pembina issue, and we realized we didn’t have a policy on fossil fuel export,” he says. “I’ll confess I didn’t think politically enough when that proposal first came along. Now, my inclination is for Portland to not be a participant in global movement of fossil fuels.”

As Congress fails to take any concrete action on the national level to halt climate change, it’s going to take action from cities and states to stop global warming, Hales says, and he believes Portland’s model is one cities around the world should be following. This summer, the mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa, Mpho Franklin “Parks” Tau, visited Portland to glean information about Portland’s green power technology, while the mayors of Louisville and Kansas City are set to arrive in the next month. “The cities keep acting while nations keep talking,” he says. “And we’re making progress.”

Maggi, the Oregon Sierra Club director, says he finds the updated climate change to be “bolder” than what he had seen from Hales before—and he noted that Hales scored big with environmental groups by rejecting Pembina, even though it cost him union and building trade support. “We’ve really seen the mayor step up in terms of laying out a vision, that’s really changed,” he says. “I think anyone running for mayor today is going to try and claim some environmental credibility. I think politically speaking, they recognize that is sort of the Portland aesthetic. It’s part of the view of ourselves, it is part who we are.”

