The November election will yield momentous changes for the city of Portland and its system of government, especially for the city council and the next mayor. The city council will expand from five to 12 seats, with voters electing three candidates from each district to represent them through ranked-choice voting, which will also be used to elect the city’s next mayor.

Nineteen people are vying for the position. Think Out Loud convened a debate with four mayoral candidates who were chosen based on the number of individual contributors to each campaign and the total money each campaign raised. Three of the candidates we invited — Rene Gonzalez, Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps — are current Portland city council members. The fourth candidate we invited, Keith Wilson, is the CEO and President of the trucking company Titan Freight Systems.

The following highlights from their conversation have been edited for length and clarity.

Enforcing the city’s ban on unsanctioned camping:

Carmen Rubio: “I think that enforcement should continue to go as the camping ban, the second version that we implemented as intended … Implementing the camping ban should happen as it is right now.”

Mapps: “Now, I know we’re not going to arrest our way out of houselessness, but being able to hold people accountable for camping in inappropriate places is a key to bringing safety and cleanliness back to our streets. … Being able to actually enforce our laws and say, ‘Hey, this is not where you’re allowed to camp.’ That is something we need to do, frankly, more of, especially when we see egregious situations and … there are very few people who are actually being held to that standard.”

Gonzalez: “I will be the strictest mayor in the West on enforcing camping bans. … We need to be crystal clear as we were for 40 years. Camping is not allowed in the city of Portland. Now, whether we push that with fines and enforcement or jail, I’m still somewhat ambiguous as to the actual tool of enforcement, but we have to be crystal clear. … I think we have to aggressively assess every instance of these campsites. If there’s other illegal behavior going on, we go after them very forcefully.”

Wilson: “So what we’re gonna do is at the early part of next year is to begin to rapidly set up shelters. The law states that if you have ample enough shelter in your community to meet the needs of those that are unsheltered, you can enforce your code completely, entirely. So (what) we have to do first is care for your community, provide compassion and care, not chaos and cruelty. But by providing that shelter and the option, you’re now able to provide and implement and enforce your codes entirely — no camping, no RVs, no more sleeping in a shopkeeper’s corridor, which is what we see every day out there. And isn’t that amazing? You provide for your most vulnerable and you actually improve the livability of your entire community. And every officer and every outreach worker or public or Portland Street Response can now provide a shelter for somebody in need.”

Position on working with Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services after city council vote that threatens partnership:

Gonzalez: “It has been shown in the last 10 years that trying to outsource this to the county has failed … I think the best innovations in the region in our sheltering have occurred at the city level: TASS sites, safe rest villages … The city has to lead on this — continuing to coordinate with the county though. It’s not taking our ball and going somewhere else, we just have to take a lead on drug sheltering and outreach.”

Rubio: “One of our roles is to partner with the county. We have shared responsibilities here and, yes, we need to get more definitive about what each of our set of rules are, but we were heading in that direction. And I feel like it’s completely irresponsible to exit just three months after we inked a new agreement together. We haven’t given it the runway to actually see the work in action.”

Wilson: “I understand the frustration that the council is experiencing right now with the Joint Office of Homeless Services. We have record unsheltered homelessness … But to pull out without having an action plan after it, especially with a month or two before the severe winter, just puts the program and the people at risk.”

Mapps: “I’m deeply committed, when I’m your next mayor, to support our Safe Rest Village system and Portland Street Response. I also expect the county to … provide housing vouchers for our clients who are in our Safe Rest Villages so we can move them first from the sidewalk into Safe Rest Villages and then into permitted housing. One of the struggles we’re having right now is we have not been able to secure an agreement with the county to actually provide those vouchers … And I’ll have to also tell you one of the things that is quite disturbing here is, for reasons that frankly still mystify me, the city and the county, or at least the county, seems to be unwilling to clearly define what the city’s role in this space is and what the county’s role in the space. And until we define that we are not going to be able to make progress.”

Assessing and changing the city’s efforts to tackle climate change

Rubio: “We do have the Portland Clean Energy Fund as a critical and useful tool and leverage point for us to make catalytic moves over the next set of years. … Over the last several years, I’ve led numerous reforms on PCEF to make sure that we are able to unlock more of those funds to fund those climate action plans. One of the big things that I’m looking forward to is we’ve been working on for the last year plus is creating the first table for climate policy and it will be the Sustainability and Climate Commission for the city of Portland first ever that we’ve ever had so that I believe should act in similar ways that akin to the Planning Commission where it will really chew deeply on these issues and make recommendations to city council.”

Mapps: “I give us kind of a middling B-grade here. My goal in the climate space is to number one: support resilience. In other words, no one should freeze to death on our streets or die of heat stroke because they can’t afford a fan or an air conditioner or even a heater. The second space that we need to really focus on is carbon reduction. I’ll tell you one of the things that concerns me, frankly, under Commissioner Rubio’s leadership of the PCEF Fund, is we’re paying about $1000 per metric ton to reduce our carbon emissions. That is far too high to be sustainable and allow us to actually meet our goals to become carbon neutral within the next couple of decades.”

Gonzalez: “I think we have a real opportunity to be a hub, a national and even global leader on how industry can drive that and what we can do at scale. So I really would like to focus on some of the opportunities created by the Clean Energy Fund to incubate industry in finding things that will scale well beyond our carbon footprint in the city of Portland, well beyond our carbon imprint at the state of Oregon level. … (The) other big piece here — we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in participation in cycling and walking and using our public transit. We used to be national leaders on that. We need to have all of those things be clean and safe, so people will utilize them again and be joyous — not just a burden — that we adopt it with joy.”

Wilson: “I wrote a bill in the Oregon legislature four years ago to reduce and remove the renewable fuel standard and address petroleum diesel, and remove to renewables completely. It didn’t pass. We’re still working it through but I’m happy to say that Carmen and her team picked it up and passed it with the council’s vote last year. That was the leadership and the lodestar that I brought to Oregon … I also have at my company the first fleet of heavy duty electric vehicles, significant carbon reduction but more importantly, black carbon reduction. So not only are we getting the CO2 reduction, we’re reducing black carbon which creates respiratory disease in our communities. We’re going to focus on electrifying the city fleet immediately so we can meet and exceed our 50% reduction by the year 2030 goals. And that is one of our single largest emissions producers in the city.”

Keith Wilson, Mingus Mapps, Carmen Rubio and Rene Gonzalez spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation: