Meet Chris Henry, candidate for Portland City Council District 4

Editor’s note: Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5. Stay informed with OPB on the presidential race, key congressional battles and other local contests and ballot measures in Oregon and Southwest Washington at opb.org/elections.

Name: Chris Henry

Age : 60

Pronouns: He/Him

Neighborhood: Tryon Creek (Collins)

Are you a renter or homeowner?: Renter

Education: Trade School

Occupation: Driver

How long you’ve lived in the city of Portland: 26 Years

Portland is facing a historic election involving a new voting system and an unusually high number of candidates. Journalists at The Oregonian/OregonLive and Oregon Public Broadcasting share a goal of ensuring that Portland voters have the information they need to make informed choices, and we also know candidates’ time is valuable and limited.

That’s why the two news organizations teamed up this cycle to solicit Portland City Council candidates’ perspectives on the big issues in this election. Here’s what they had to say.

For each of the following questions, we asked candidates to limit their answers to 150 words.

Name two existing city policies or budget items you’d make it a priority to change. Why did you select those and how do you plan to line up at least 7 votes on the council to make them happen? Please avoid broad, sweeping statements and instead provide details.

According to an Oregon Public Banking Alliance report, Portland is giving $100 million annually to Wall Street in interest. This isn’t how voters want our money spent. Portland declared a climate emergency in 2020, yet gives our money to the biggest fossil fuel investors like J.P Morgan, which bagged another $23 million this year.

Meanwhile, the PNW is woefully underprepared for what will be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history - the Cascadia Megaquake. The entire Portland Bureau of Emergency Management receives only $5 million/year from the city. Only a fraction of that goes towards earthquake preparedness. And as OPB reported this February, the PBEM just cut its only dedicated earthquake readiness position.

This is a disgrace, and a profound abdication of responsibility. It won’t be hard to get seven votes to change this if my colleagues intend to look their constituents in the eye.

What previous accomplishments show that you are the best pick in your district? Please be specific.

For the last two decades, as a working-class candidate without corporate backing I have been stumping across Oregon for campaign finance reform. I got into this fight because I wanted to keep utility prices down and transition our grid to clean, renewable energy back in 2004. PGE - then owned by Enron - poured exorbitant resources into defeating our ballot measure. Until this year, Oregon had the highest per capita rate of corporate contributions of any state and no legal limits whatsoever.

I am very proud of the work that my allies and I in the Honest Elections Action League have accomplished to end that corruption. This includes campaign finance limits for Multnomah County in 2016, for Portland in 2018, and Oregon’s first state-wide limits this year. Our work also contributed to the newly established matching funds system we are using for the first time in this city council election.

Related: What you need to know about voting in Oregon and Southwest Washington

Portland is on track to permit the fewest number of multifamily units in 15 years and remains thousands of units below what’s needed to meet demand. What steps would you take to dramatically and quickly increase the availability of housing?

Even with Portland’s relatively low vacancy rates, there are still thousands of empty homes in the metro area and I would seek to mandate that these be filled. Whenever possible, we need to remove profit from the equation and recognize that housing is a human right. Our permitting process needs to reflect this, and prioritize meeting people’s needs and the city’s environmental goals rather than private profit.

Where new construction is required, I would stack functions and invest city resources in building state-of-the-art climate-friendly and earthquake-resilient dwellings. There are shockingly affordable and astonishingly ecologically sophisticated options available for this, like the earthbag homes designed by Architect Nader Khalili which uniquely withstood the major 2015 earthquake in Nepal. I would seek to partner with local universities for research and development, and combine this initiative with a green jobs program that trains and employs our residents to revitalize our city.

The next City Council is going to have to make some very difficult decisions regarding what to fund and how. What essential services must the city provide and how should the city sustainably fund them?

As I mentioned above, these decisions will remain difficult as long as our city’s finances are beholden to Wall Street. I am proposing the establishment of a Public Bank for Portland, that would reinvest any surplus in improving our city rather than enriching shareholders. This plan has been developed in cooperation with the Oregon Public Banking Alliance, which is also working with legislators at the state level.

The city’s responsibility should be to provide services that uphold our residents’ basic needs and rights, while contributing to the public good. With a Public Bank, we can invest in green, earthquake-resilient housing; mental health and addiction treatment services; and more public sanitation facilities like showers and restrooms. By investing in green job training and worker cooperatives to meet our climate and earthquake goals, we can economically empower the 99% and develop the survival infrastructure our city needs for the megaquake.

Related: Issues important to Oregon voters

Portlanders have approved many tax measures in the past decade – supporting affordable housing, free preschool programs and green energy initiatives. Are there specific taxes or levies you want eliminated or would choose to not renew? Are there specific taxes or levies you would support creating? Why?

The levies or ‘hidden taxes’ I’m the most concerned about are the exorbitant rent and utility rate hikes the city is currently permitting through a lack of regulation. To regulate away these hidden taxes we should establish rent control. And we should also make PGE a public utility district. This would facilitate our transition to a decentralized grid with greater autonomy and independence at the neighborhood level. Prices would be much lower, and we’d have the resilience we need for when the megaquake hits.

As for new taxes, that’s simple: tax the 1%! Massachusetts recently implemented a 4% tax on incomes over $1,000,000/year - modest, yet enough to raise over $1 billion for education and infrastructure. Portland should also raise our tax rate for big corporations to that of comparable cities, to resolve the budget crisis and help small businesses too.

Do you have any concerns with the changes coming to city elections and city governance? If so, what would you like to see change?

My biggest concern is that voter education efforts have been insufficient and that many voters, come November, will still not know about their new district or have prepared ahead of time to learn about the astonishing number of candidates running. Although many campaigns, such as mine, are teaching voters about the redistricting and matching funds, the city should also be playing a more proactive role here.

Nevertheless, I think this issue is symptomatic of the underappreciation of the importance of local elections in much of our country’s political discourse. This is where we have the most leverage to make significant changes, yet - for a whole host of reasons - it is often where people have the least knowledge about who their representatives may be. But what the City of Portland chooses to do with its $8 billion/ year budget is no small matter, and our leadership can have national repercussions.

Related: Listen to 'OPB Politics Now'

For the five remaining questions, we asked candidates to answer in 50 words or fewer:

Do you favor arresting and jailing people who camp on public property in Portland who refuse repeated offers of shelter, such as the option to sleep in a city-designated tiny home cluster?

Absolutely not. Incarceration only exacerbates the struggles of houseless people while failing to resolve the systemic factors that reproduce homelessness. Housing is a human right. Appropriate dwellings and mental health services should be provided for all in need. Would you want to sleep in a city-designated tiny home cluster?

Would you vote yes on a proposal to fund hundreds more police officers than the City Council has already authorized? Why or why not? How would the city pay for it?

Absolutely not, this would be a massive step in the wrong direction. Portland has yet to rectify the crimes of racial profiling and illegal use of force committed by our department, like others around the country. We need to scale back policing and invest more in unarmed first responders.

Do you support putting the Clean Energy Fund measure back on the ballot? What, if any changes, would you support?

With or without a new ballot measure, I support strengthening the Clean Energy Fund’s mandate to encompass key objectives like investing in climate-friendly earthquake readiness, establishing a green public bank, and decommissioning Zenith Energy’s CEI hub before its seismic vulnerability creates a massive oil spill in the Willamette River.

Which would you prioritize: Creation of more protected bike lanes and priority bus lanes or improved surfacing of existing degraded driving lanes?

These go hand-in-hand - we need more bus and bike lanes for our climate goals, but what’s the point if their quality is degraded? Road improvement should also include more eco-friendly methods of repairing degraded lanes, like using biochar in asphalt and concrete.

Have the problems impacting downtown Portland received too much or too little attention from current city leaders? Why?

They have received too much ‘attention.’ Political misleadership always pays lip service to addressing them, but has failed to actually do so. Until we reckon with Portland’s structural challenges like seismic vulnerability and financial capture by Wall Street, and democratize our economy to revitalize downtown ourselves, nothing will change.