Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle shares vision for city’s future, navigating challenges

In her State of the City address last month, Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle touted the city’s rapid growth and development since she was first elected to the city council more than a decade ago. But with that growth comes challenges for Washington’s fourth-largest city.

In the past decade, homelessness has increased by more than 250%, prompting city officials to declare a state of emergency to streamline responding to this crisis. Last year, voters approved a new property tax levy that is expected to raise $100 million over 10 years to shore up the city’s Affordable Housing Fund. Meanwhile, hundreds of new housing units are being planned for the Heights District, a neighborhood redevelopment project in central Vancouver.

Mayor McEnerny-Ogle joins us to talk about her vision for the city’s future, the challenges it faces and reflections on her past decade in city government.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today from Vancouver City Hall. According to census data crunched by the site SmartAsset, Vancouver was the fastest growing city in the Pacific Northwest between 2017 and 2022. That growth has brought bigger challenges for Washington’s fourth largest city because Vancouver is trying to do two things at once: re-develop big swaths of the city, without pricing out existing residents. Many people have already been priced out. Homelessness has increased by more than 250% over the last decade and 43 people died while homeless here last year, prompting city officials to declare a state of emergency recently. Fentanyl overdoses are a big reason for that. They’re spiking here as they are around the West and there are big questions about the future of the I-5 Bridge over the Columbia as well.

We’ve come to talk about all of this with Anne McEnerny-Ogle. She spent 30 years as a teacher in Lake Oswego schools on the other side of the Columbia before becoming a member of the Vancouver City Council in 2014. She has been mayor since 2018. Thanks very much for letting us take over a little portion of City Hall.

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: Thank you for coming across the river.

Miller: The Columbian noted recently during your State of the City address that you used the word “change” 15 times in something like 20 minutes. How has the city changed since you’ve been a part of city government just 10 years ago?

McEnerny-Ogle: Tremendously. And as you pointed out, the population has increased tremendously. Lots of individuals are finding that the North Bank of the river is a great place to be. They have different tax situations between Oregon and Washington. But also there, it’s almost like a climate migration coming up out of dry desert areas where they want to see water and green.

Miller: So not just people going from the Portland area south of Columbia, but you’re saying people coming from where?

McEnerny-Ogle: Absolutely. California, New Mexico, Mexico, even interestingly enough from Florida, from Washington DC. People are coming to the Pacific Northwest because we have a tremendous amount of water. But we also have green. We have four distinct seasons, two hours to the beach, two hours to the mountains, we have mountains, not hills, we have forests, we have…

Miller: A lot of what you’re describing, not the taxes and maybe that’s a key part here, but a lot of that is true for Portland itself.

McEnerny-Ogle: Yes.

Miller: …and for Oregon as a whole. So why Vancouver in particular? I mean, we’ve talked in recent years about a declining population in Portland. What do you think is different about Vancouver?

McEnerny-Ogle: People come in and they do evaluate both sides of the river. They look at Oregon and Oregon income taxes and Oregon tax laws.

They look at Washington. No income tax. Make that determination. Am I better off with a sales tax or an income tax? They want the area but then they start looking for houses and prices of homes and such. How close to an urban destination can I get with a little elbow room? So we still have a little bit of land here where you can have 100 by 100 or you can have five acres. That’s not necessarily the case down on the Oregon side.

Miller: It says on the city website right now that you’re transforming from being a suburban community to a diverse urban city. What do you mean by that?

McEnerny-Ogle: Well, I like to say an urban destination. [Laughter]

Miller: OK.

McEnerny-Ogle: So I married in Washington. I married in Vancouver 44 years ago.

Miller: From where, Vancouver?

McEnerny-Ogle: Oh, I’m sorry. I am a Eugene girl. And then we lived in Oregon City. Terry and I met in ‘78, married in ‘80, then moved here because my husband taught at Prairie High School up in the Battleground School District. We could not find a home on the Oregon side with the same quality and price that we could over here on the Vancouver side.

Miller: Even then that was the case?

McEnerny-Ogle: Even then. Oh, my gosh. And we thought we couldn’t afford what we were buying for $70,000. It was outrageous.

Miller: Both of you being school teachers.

McEnerny-Ogle: And it was 13.25% interest rates in those days. Oh! But even then…this is my husband’s neck of the woods. This is where Terry grew up. We have a symphony, we have parks, we have restaurants now that used to be international restaurants. We have different events here every weekend starting in April, May, June, July all the way through October. We have farmers markets, we have all of those things and people are starting to say, I don’t need to go across the river to the symphony. I don’t need to go across the river to the concerts. We have concerts up north at the fairgrounds, at ilani [Casino] and at different places around. I can have a great meal here. We have entertainment here.

Miller: What about jobs? Do you have a white board somewhere where it says the percentage of Vancouverites who cross the river every day because that’s where their job is? Or is that a number you more or less know as Vancouver mayor?

McEnerny-Ogle: Yes and no. I don’t have a white board. I do have Chambers of Commerce, CREDC, ICC, some of those business organizations that tell me what we have. The 60,000 that used to commute across before the pandemic stopped commuting across. So many of them didn’t return to that commute, but they still work in Oregon, but now they work from home. And we are starting to get the larger commuters back, but they’re not there yet. So the job piece is something that we always struggle with. We have opportunities here, we have headquarters here – Banfield Pet Hospital, those types of things – but we still struggle with that because many of the businesses that want to come here want 20, 25, 30, 35 acres that we don’t have. We’re going up, not out. And so that’ll still be a struggle.

Miller: How can you increase jobs here? If that is one of the challenges of just acreage, what levers do you have in city government? Because if one of your goals is to be less of a suburban community, less of a bedroom community and more of an intact, you call it urban destination, but a self-contained city, jobs seem like an important piece of that. A symphony is not enough.

McEnerny-Ogle: No it isn’t.

Miller: How do you make more jobs here?

McEnerny-Ogle: We do not have the incentives that Oregon has. So we’ve had different companies that are staying in Oregon, they came over and they took a look at us, but they negotiated with the states about what incentives. Washington couldn’t give them the incentives that Oregon gave them for taxes and credits and a number of different things. What we can do and what we have done is we will work with you and we will give you a planner to work through all of your permitting, depending on your size, of course. But about 91% to 92% of our businesses are small businesses. So we also work with them. We’ll help them with a pre-lease. Before you lease the building, come and talk to us, we’ll walk you through the building so you know what to do. We want to keep and retain our small businesses so that they are thriving because that’s the majority of the jobs.

Miller: I want to turn to what’s known as the Heights District, a 200 or so acre area, about three to three-and-a-half miles east of here. What’s your vision for that parcel?

McEnerny-Ogle: Well, first of all, the highest part in Vancouver. On the north edge of that property are the two largest water storage stations in this particular area that feeds 268,000 people, because we’re all water gravity fed. The rest of that area was an old mall and the mall was going to be sold for storage and we said, oh no, we’re not putting storage up there. So if you look at the plans, we only own a portion of it. There are several different private developments and property owners up there. We worked with them and the neighborhoods around it for affordable housing along Mill Plain, which is one of our best rapid transit lines. Then we have tall buildings in the center for housing with mixed use underneath. But when you’re standing on the very top of that building, you’ll see Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Hood, the Portland Hills over there and the Columbia River. So it will be a destination, over 2,000 trees there. And then housing, housing, housing, housing and retail at the bottom with beautiful walkable, rollable streets and sidewalks and everything else. It’s a center.

Miller: It’s housing, housing, housing. I think you said it four times. How much do you think about housing as Vancouver mayor?

McEnerny-Ogle: A lot because of our homeless issue, but also because we’re in the middle of Growth Management Act. We have to redo our comp plan and prepare for 2045, similar to the program that Oregon has, and we’re required by the county to plan for those thousands and thousands of housing units. And what we’re looking for is any parcel, any piece of land where we can go up. Again, we wanna stay within our boundaries, go up, not down and out.

Miller: A state report found that, as a whole, Clark County needs to create more than 50,000 units of low income housing over just the next 20 years to keep up with needs. It’s a staggering amount.

McEnerny-Ogle: It is.

Miller: And if I understood correctly, what you were talking about in terms of the tall buildings and the top of the heights that have the views of all those Cascade peaks, most of that’s not low income housing.

McEnerny-Ogle: Not that main building, but everything around it could be.

Miller: What’s the larger approach right now to affordable or low income housing within the city limits?

McEnerny-Ogle: So the city actually does not build anything. What we do is receive the revenues, work with all of our partner agencies who do build. So for example, Vancouver Housing Authority, they were here during World War II when they built the workforce housing 80-plus years ago, a very successful program. We asked the voters, will you raise your property taxes to put money into a fund called the Affordable Housing Fund? It has different categories, but one of those is to do just exactly that. And the partnership with Vancouver Housing Authority is incredible.

Miller: Is that something like $100 million dollars over 10 years?

McEnerny-Ogle: Yes, it is good for you. But we need private developers to jump in there also. What I like about the Housing Authority, they’re able to leverage with federal and state funds and use our funds as part of that packaging. We’ll need the private developers to work in there, too, but the Housing Authority can build units. In fact, right behind City Hall, we’ll be taking out all of that grass in the area over here. One of those structures will be 95 affordable units, workforce housing right here next to City Hall.

Miller: One of the issues that I read about recently that city leaders were debating recently was whether or not to allow this pot of money collected by Vancouver residents, the taxes that they pay – whether or not that money should be used for people outside the city in outer Clark County. Where do you stand on that right now? And I saw debates on both sides.

McEnerny-Ogle: It was very difficult. So what happens is the identification of the individual who is homeless. You are homeless. How long have you been homeless? Who are you? And people will say, “oh, they’re all from Portland.” No, that’s not the case whatsoever. In our Point-in-Time Count, about 8% to 9% came from outside of the state. Of that remaining, half were Vancouver, the other half were from Clark County outside the city limits. When you ask someone, where do you live? Many individuals will say, “oh, I have a Vancouver address.” That’s lovely, but many of them are just in our urban growth area, not in the city limits. We could eventually annex them but many people do not know where the boundary is for that. So when we are asking individuals, “what was your last address that you did live at,” they most likely will say, “XXX Vancouver, Washington.” They are probably ours, in some aspect.

People come to Vancouver for a number of different reasons. And so trying to identify, how long have you been homeless? We take them through a housing assessment. At this point, we want to use our tax money for individuals who were here, who are here and who are homeless and get them in that path to housing. To distinguish whether you were on this side of 39th Street or you were on the other side of 39th Street probably isn’t important to us right now. If you were from New Mexico, Arizona, California, that probably would be of interest to us because you came here for a reason. What was the reason? Are you living with family? Could you be living with family? What are some possibilities? As you do your housing assessment, what options are open to you?

Miller: I’m curious, earlier you said that a lot of people that you talk to say that people who are homeless in Vancouver, they’re from Portland.

McEnerny-Ogle: I know.

Miller: Well, where do you think that comes from? That idea?

McEnerny-Ogle: That’s such an old, old idea. And it popped up with the I-5 Bridge way back in the nineties when people would say, “oh, if you change the bridge and you do all of those stuff, all of those people would be coming to us from Portland.”

Miller: And one of those things that we can talk about is if you put light rail.

McEnerny-Ogle: Exactly, the crime train issue. No. And what we are finding is that that’s not the case whatsoever. These are our individuals, for the most part, who are homeless. People do migrate back and forth across the bridge, across the state. But for the most part, the individuals that are here are ours.

Miller: I’m curious about that possessive pronoun. You’re using “ours,” because the way I hear it, the people that you’re talking to are saying “no, these are Portland” and you’re saying “no, these are ours.” Maybe this is an unfair way to put it, but my assumption is if somebody says that it’s a way of saying “we don’t need to really worry about them as much because they’re not from here.” When you say no, they are from here, does that change the conversation or does it not?

McEnerny-Ogle: I see your point, Dave, but I think as we are looking at it, there’s a lot of education that we need. Actually, when we started this homeless issue for the city of Vancouver that wasn’t on our charter. Homelessness was the county’s responsibility. And 10, 11 years ago when this issue came forward, council was saying “no, hold it this isn’t our issue.”

Miller: We don’t have money for it or authority.

McEnerny-Ogle: We don’t get the money for it. This isn’t our authority, this is the county. But as we learn more and more about what was happening within our city and what we needed and what we couldn’t get, we made that decision to say we need to try something. We need to get into this issue and work this issue and start educating ourselves on this. We screwed up. We made some mistakes along the line. We then went out on field trips to learn what other individuals were doing and who is homeless?

Miller: What’s one of the lessons you learned? I mean, what do you see as one of your missteps at the beginning?

McEnerny-Ogle: Our Navigation Center. We started with a Navigation Center thinking that individuals who needed homeless services would come to the center, learn about what they needed and then go back. Well, where were they? They were living in tents all over the city. Coming in and going back was a huge issue. How do you get in? How do you leave your stuff in your tent with the confidence that’s going to be there when you come back, and that wasn’t happening. So they brought their stuff with them and then they didn’t leave to go back to their tent. They brought the tents in. And what was happening is they brought it into the area so they had easy access and then it was almost, well, it was awful when we had snow and ice. The Navigation Center closed at 5 p.m. It’s still snowing. There’s still ice out there. Are you saying sorry, you’re out the door now? Go back to your tent. What we realized is that the process was a great idea to start with. We didn’t think it through to figure out the before and after part of it.

Miller: How was the Bridge Shelter that you’re talking about different? I’m curious about the lesson learned.

McEnerny-Ogle: Yeah, you don’t leave with that. What that will be is a shelter that bridges between your tent and your safe stay or your more permanent supportive housing. We need to get you out of the tent into a place, 150 beds, services, wrap-around services. You don’t need to leave at seven in the morning.

Miller: Where are you right now in terms of siting that?

McEnerny-Ogle: We have three sites that we’re looking at. This isn’t going to be easy because we had some sites, but they were on septic tanks. We didn’t want that. We had a site that looked very good, but it was in a swampy area. So we’ll continue to look, we’re hoping to find it, nail it down and figure out how to fund it with all of our different partners before we announce .

Miller: In December, you took part along with other officials and a lot of community members in the National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day ceremony downtown here. That was a somber event to mark the fact that 43 people died while experiencing homelessness in Vancouver in 2023.

McEnerny-Ogle: Yeah.

Miller: Since then, at least eight more people have died on Vancouver streets.

McEnerny-Ogle: Yes.

Miller: What are you doing specifically to prevent people from dying?

McEnerny-Ogle: We can’t do enough to prevent it. Fentanyl has made a huge difference in our clientele. So who is out there and who is dying? Many of our homeless people do not have the medical services they need.

Miller: This is another thing that cities traditionally haven’t done.

McEnerny-Ogle: Yes.

Miller: What is the city’s role in your mind?

McEnerny-Ogle: Absolutely. So if you’re in our safe stay, our safe park or our heart team is out or anyone, they call 911, just like anybody else would call 911. Firefighters come, paramedics come along with them, they throw them in an ambulance, take them over to PeaceHealth or Legacy and such and treat them. And if it’s a fentanyl piece, Narcan will help a little bit, but if it has the horse tranquilizer in it, that doesn’t work with Narcan, or you have to have several because it’s a respiratory piece. So you call 911, just like everybody else calls 911 if they’re in a traditional home with a heart attack. So what we’re finding is it’s the conditions of being homeless, but it’s also fentanyl that is cheap and nasty stuff and then it’s mixed with trank. And then you have a combination that makes it really hard to save an individual.

Miller: What is it like to be the leader of a city, when some of the most intractable problems and the issues that the public is most focused on aren’t really ones that fall under your jurisdiction?

McEnerny-Ogle: City government used to be just infrastructure –

roads, streets, sidewalks, water…

Miller: Police officers.

McEnerny-Ogle: …police officers, fires, parks, that sort of routine. We have gone into more partnership. So this morning, just before I came here, I was with a group that had Salvation Army. It had a council for the homeless. It had St. Vincent de Paul, it had senators, it had Fourth Plain Forward. Peace Health was there. A number of different folks on a panel were talking just exactly about that issue of what do we do? How do we partner together? No one agency can handle all of this. And each of us get together and work together. You might be the Giving Closet giving clothes. You might be in a Recovery Cafe with a community court. You might be the NAACP or Fourth Plain Forward. Everyone is jumping in with our arms around these issues trying to help a little bit. It’s like lifting this table. We need more people to be around it and help with it. We’re not in it by ourselves, but we can organize that table.

We can organize those individuals, we can call them together, we can advocate for the funding up in Olympia and work with our county to use those resources that come from the feds to the state to the county to make all of this happen. But it’s kind of our game, our partnership that makes it happen. And that’s whether it’s this crisis, whether it’s the I-5 Bridge or the Southwest Washington Training Center, some of those are not ours, but we’re here to advocate for it and to pull everyone together to work on it.

Miller: I want to turn to the bridge. You mentioned it earlier. Is there going to be a new I-5 Bridge over the Columbia?

McEnerny-Ogle: Yes! There will be in your lifetime.

Miller: I asked that with appropriate skepticism because we have been talking about it for a long time and the conversations precede Think Out Loud, which has been on the show on the air since 2008. But this has been going on for decades.

McEnerny-Ogle: Oh. Yes.

Miller: So why are you so sure that’s actually going to happen?

McEnerny-Ogle: Because we made it over some major hurdles. The state of Washington put that first billion in...

Miller: After backing up before?

McEnerny-Ogle: Yeah. Well, and rightly so because we kind of screwed up way back with our last opportunity that we could have put our money in and we didn’t. So we apologized. And then we jumped right in and the governor said yes and all of the folks up in Olympia said yes, make it happen. So we put the first billion in. Oregon put their billion in and I was there for the Oregon vote. It was the last thing they did in their session. I was up in the balcony and it was so nonchalant. They had a little break, they went and got something to eat and drink, then they came back, then they just kind of waited around and I thought, do you not know you have a major vote here? And you have to say yes!

Miller: Were you expecting confetti?

McEnerny-Ogle: I was expecting champagne and confetti and they did nothing. They just said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. We’re adjourned. Sine die. And I went, don’t you know what you just did?

Miller: What did they do?

McEnerny-Ogle: They voted yes.

Miller: I guess I knew that. I mean, what does that mean? I’d love to hear your articulation of the significance of this, of why this matters.

McEnerny-Ogle: They realize this is a bridge of national significance. $132 million of commodities go across that bridge every single day. You can sit up here in our balcony and watch the big semis go across. That’s thousands of dollars, $132 million every day go across that bridge. When people saw the Key Bridge go down, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They know what the video looks like when this baby goes down. This is built on Douglas fir trees. They took Douglas fir trees, wrapped them together and they sunk them in mud. It’s not steel and concrete and bedrock. Think of those Douglas fir trees as pretzels and chocolate pudding. When this goes down and those 900 ton weights at the top fall and crash through and everything falls, you’re not going to find the people, you’re not going to find the cars. This river is so deep and fast, that’ll wash out and $132 million of commodities are going to need to find another way to get up and down this I-5, through Oregon, through Washington. They understood what this means and so does the federal government.

I just got back from DC this week on Tuesday night. US Department of Transportation, federal highways, federal transit, talk to our senators staff and congresswoman to help push for that next and last piece. Well, not necessarily totally last. It’s the $1.5 billion from the Bridge Investment Program. That’s the one that says, keep going, you got it. It’s important to get the draft supplemental EIS, the comment period and the record of decision done, because by October 2025 they have got to put the coffer dams in the river. So that’s the salmon window, the construction window, when the salmon are not running up and down – they have from October to January. Every day they’re late adds a million dollars of inflation to labor materials costs. If they don’t make that window of October 2025 and start construction, they have to wait an entire year. You know your math well enough, 365 days at a million dollars a day is going to add to that cost that is already rising as we wait now. It’s going to happen. We have enough individuals that understand how important this is on both sides of the river,

both cities, both counties and states and the federal government and the senators back up in Olympia and Salem and in Washington DC that know that this is a bridge of national significance.

Miller: And just briefly, am I right in saying that it can only happen with light rail because of the necessity of federal funds being tied to light rail at this point?

McEnerny-Ogle: It has to have mass transit. And the mass transit piece that was selected by Oregon, Portland and TriMet and that side of the river and our side was, OK, let’s look at light rail. So that is part of the discussion right now as they are looking at the draft supplemental, what is the cost of the capital costs and the maintenance and operation of light rail and then who will fund that? How will it be funded? And it’s such a unique thing because it runs into two cities, but it is owned and operated by an agency outside of Washington. So that is the negotiation piece that is happening right now.

Miller: Anne McEnerny-Ogle, thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it. Let’s talk again.

McEnerny-Ogle: Wow, that was fast.

Miller: [Laughter] That’s what I aim for. Anne McEnerny-Ogle is the mayor of Vancouver.

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