Portland, Oregon officials embrace green ideals to lure industry to town

Portland's politicians, flush with the success of landing Vestas Wind Systems last month, are pushing for a "green industry" strategy to convert the city's Birkenstocks-and-granola image into meat-and-potatoes jobs.

The city has been buffeted by bad economic news, from an 8 percent-plus unemployment rate to May Co.'s decision this month to pull Meier & Frank's administrative headquarters from Portland.

City leaders say part of the solution lies in uniting Oregon's environment-friendly culture with economic development, using Vestas to encourage a specialty in products and services that benefit the environment.

"We are the urban center for a sustainable economy, and Oregon is recognized as being one of the leading, if not the leading, sustainable state," said Mayor Vera Katz. "We have the credentials already."

Skeptics warn that the city government risks tilting at windmills when basic business problems should take center stage.

Industrial land is scarce -- Vestas took the biggest chunk left in the Portland area. Local taxes penalize entrepreneurs. And some of the same green regulations popular with environmentalists have given Oregon a reputation for overzealous environmental enforcement.

"City Hall interest is wonderful if you get them to deal with the issues that have created a perception that Portland is a harder place to do business than many other places in the country," said Marty Harris, the Portland Development Commission's economic development director.

Despite wariness from business leaders, the city's growing green-sector brain trust has clearly captured the City Council's ear, helping to accomplish a rare feat: unifying the left-leaning body behind an economic development push.

Katz and city Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Erik Sten say the city needs to look at nuts-and-bolts issues, too. But they have sent the development commission a letter serving notice that they expect the green strategy to be a serious part of an overall plan.

A blue-ribbon committee staffed by the development commission embarks this month on a five-month effort to evaluate 10 different industry groups, including sustainable industries and biotech.

Saltzman, who oversees the city's sustainable development bureau, says the first challenge to building green business "is getting the economic development types to really buy into this."

"We've always been the place willing to take on environmental issues," said Sten, who has helped update Portland's global warming strategy. "This is really about taking a whole other step and make environmental issues profitable for the city."

Vestas is expected to bring as many as 1,000 jobs to a new wind-turbine plant in North Portland, which will serve as the Danish company's U.S. headquarters.

The company's choice of Portland highlights the potential of local green manufacturing, though that sector has been limited so far. Perhaps the best example to date: Stormwater Management, a Portland company that makes filters to clean storm water before it runs into streams. The company, with 52 workers, has sales in Australia and a new office in Vancouver, B.C.

The Portland area does have a sizable contingent of engineers and architects focused on green building and environmental cleanup, adding those high-paid jobs at quadruple the national rate, according to a 1999 city study.

The area's green reputation has also persuaded environmental think tanks, including the U.S. Green Building Council and the International Sustainable Development Foundation, to set up headquarters in Portland. And "Team Oregon," a group of Portland-based consulting firms, is working to help Taiwan's government increase green practices.

IDC, an international industrial design and construction firm based in Portland, wants the Portland area to leverage its semiconductor manufacturing niche to become a center for production of solar photovoltaic cells, a process that uses many of the same skills required for making silicon wafers.

Century West Engineering, also based in Portland, has started a Center for Sustainable Engineering to develop green products, including an air compressor that uses less electricity and a new method of drawing energy from water flows that could cut the need for dams.

Now, many of those same engineers and green gurus are pushing the city and state to shore up green manufacturing and green product development.

"For the 20 years I've been here, Oregon's environmental and business communities have been very divisive," said Steven Straus, president of a Portland-based engineering firm, Glumac International. "Here's an opportunity they both can get behind 100 percent."

Despite Portland Harbor's listing as a Superfund site, the city and state have become green darlings through initiatives beginning with the Oregon Bottle Bill in the 1970s and including the urban growth boundary, the city's ban on polystyrene foam in restaurants and Portland's first-in-the-nation plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Portland increased garbage bills by 25 cents a month to support green building that does less damage to the environment, and the city is buying hybrid cars to set a green example.

Portland-area firms, including Nike and retailer Norm Thompson, are leading in making their buildings and manufacturing processes green, helping fuel the demand for engineers and architects.

Bill McDonough, a green business consultant whose clients include Ford and the city of Chicago, says Portland has a chance to take the U.S. lead.

"Of all the places I go, Portland seems to be the one that has the ability to do something really inspiring," McDonough said. "You've got a whole series of things that have happened here over time that aren't happening elsewhere."

But other areas appear to be pulling even on green policies -- and a desire to capitalize on them. Last year, San Francisco's voters approved issuing $100 million in revenue bonds to develop and purchase solar and wind power for city government use.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley wants his town to be the country's center for green technology. Virginia offers a solar manufacturing grant that has helped draw two plants since 1998. And last month, Michigan announced that it wants to keep auto manufacturing jobs in the state by helping automakers transition to emissions-free cars.

It's not clear what Oregon's potential is to develop green industry. The sector is tough to define, and Oregon lacks a research university at the level of Stanford or the University of Washington to help attract and train entrepreneurs.

"I don't know how much (a green industry push) affects our ability to compete in the free world," said Bob Butler, an industrial property broker. "But Portland is not on the short list for Fortune 500 companies, and it's not on the long list normally. Maybe it would do well to put us on somebody's list."

A recent study commissioned by the development commission and agencies in Washington and Canada concluded that the Pacific Northwest is poised to build a niche in clean energy, such as wind and solar power, listing 26 companies in the area.

But the study listed only four Oregon companies, including PacifiCorp and a subsidiary of Idaho Power.

Assessments of the potential green industry market are also mixed. Boosters cite western Europe's embracing tougher environmental standards to combat global warming and to compel companies to generate less waste.

The study done partly for Portland's development commission concluded the market for clean energy is expected to average $180 billion a year during the next 20 years, about twice the size of the aircraft industry.

If the Northwest captured 3.5 percent of that market, it would bring 32,000 jobs by 2020, the study said.

But critics say green solutions have been extolled prematurely before. In a recent study, researchers from the libertarian Cato Institute concluded that alternative energy will account for only 2.8 percent of U.S. energy use by 2020, up from 2 percent now.

It's also not clear how much value green businesses put on being in green places. Vestas chief executive Johannes Poulsen, cited access to transportation and proximity to Northwest projects using Vestas turbines. The city's green reputation "wasn't a deciding factor," he said.

Katz and some economic development officials insist softer issues are important.

In visits, Vestas officials praised the city's bike paths and even its weather, Katz said, adding that the city and state need to talk up the fact that workers like living here.

Beyond marketing, green business boosters want to see Oregon government buy green more often, even if it means higher costs. Others envision an all-out pursuit of green industry, akin to the state's pursuit of high-tech firms with tax and development incentives.

Katz and others who visited Austin, Texas, last year came away thinking Austin's techniques for promoting high-tech, from hefty endowments for research professors to reduced utility rates and rents, could work in Oregon as well.

Rick Schulberg, head of the International Sustainable Development Foundation, acknowledged that focusing on an emerging industry would frustrate many businesspeople. But Schulberg, who worked in economic development under former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, said business should see the glass half-full.

"The City Council is going to bump into the exact same problems talking about developing a green economy as they would talking about the economy in general," Schulberg said. "It's a great way to get the city paying attention to the ball, even if it's not your ball that gets them in the game."

You can reach Scott Learn at 503-221-8564 or by e-mail at scottlearn@news.oregonian.com.

Since Christians and pro-family conservatives are usually the ones who get wrongfully accused in today's anti-Christian atmosphere, Christians should read articles linked above at #23, about the 3 teenagers blamed for the murder of the sister of one of the teenagers, one of the cops is a church youth group leader and one set of the parents of one of the teenagers are devout Christians. I wonder if that's why one set of parents (the Treadways) let their guard down when their son was being questioned. That's the teenager they kept awake without food for 26 hours until he confessed. Everyone knows that a 15 year old would be incoherent, confused, maybe even hallucinatory, after 26 hours of no sleep and no food.

They also had to know that the transient had a high probability of having murdered the little girl. There were eyewitness reports of him obsessed with searching for a "Tracey", reports of his standing outside the Crowe's house, looking up at the house of the murdered little girl, a cop who was called to the neighborhood after the transient was banging on house windows and reported that the transient was nowhere to be seen, BUT the little girl's garage laundry room door was closing (the paranoid schizophrenic transient was probably hiding from the police car! DUH).

I don't believe it was investigative bungling, as the articles allege, because they didn't even take procedural steps to exonerate the transient. If they had taken steps to exonerate him, they could have bungled at the steps, but they acted more in a hurry to get him out the door.

So the question is, why would these investigators and prosecutors be so relentless to get a confession from these kids when they had to have considered that the transient might murder again and their prosecution of the three boys might later be questioned? The answer has to be that they were so filled with vanity and pride that they were willing to put three innocent boys in prison and willing to risk the transient murdering again just so they could be named as the investigators that put the three teenage boys away. After all, unfortunately, a group of teenage boys killing a sister of one of the boys to the utter shock of the families and community sells A LOT more newspapers and gets a lot better cable news network ratings than "just" a schizophrenic transient who murders in a fit of psychosis.

When investigators get all the national publicity, and the accompanying accolades, they also get the opportunity at better paying jobs with better titles in what is probably a very competitive field.

There's an anti-attorney movement that is growing across the country by victims of the modern Babylonian court system and its players. These players continue to victimize innocent families and their actions are such that it is obvious that they have NO interest in getting to the truth, better to quickly prosecute a fall guy or confiscate a child for their sodomite agenda. However, when in Babylon, sometimes its more effective to put out a fire as the Babylonians do.

In many of the wrongful child confiscation cases and in the Crowe case above, some of the innocent victims have been helped by maverick attorneys while I note that many who go into court representing themselves, such as the Gastons, have received no relief whatsoever despite getting lots of media attention.

I believe that people who choose to represent themselves often do it for noble reasons 1) They have no money for an attorney; 2) They've already gone through several unscrupulous attorneys who lied to them just to steal their money, sometimes their life savings. 3) They can't find an attorney who will fight for them or take their case even. 4) They see the corruption within the system and don't want to be a part of it. 5) They rightly believe that many aspects of the modern Babylonian court and police systems tread on many constitutional rights.

BUT if someone represents themself, all of these facts matter little to the corrupt politicians, judges, lawyers, and police officers, who already scoff at the constitution. Their only incentive to back down, that I can see, is some loss of face, or other loss, exacted within the community of their profession. That might be easier to do with one of the one in a million ethical attorneys who knows the system and the manners in which they can attach some form of superficial shame or ridicule to the evil lawyers and lie enforcement officers, then trying to overturn the system by proclaiming the truth on your own. They aren't listening. Things aren't going to turn around; that optimistic viewpoint is not in the Bible. Better to come out of Babylon, but in the meantime, we need to educate ourselves on what mistakes to avoid when wrongly accused (cooperating, thinking that the truth presented to the Babylonians will get them to set you free, etc.) and which attorneys may be trustworthy, not necessarily Christians, but will fight for Christians' rights be citizens, parents and Christians all at the same time.

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