Peak Oil on May 10 Portland City Council Agenda!

Greetings Portland Peak Oil community!

We have fantastic news! As many of you know, we've been working with City of Portland elected officials for the past few months on a resolution to appoint a peak oil task force. Our workhas paid off as the resolution will be brought to City Council next Wednesday, May 10th, with the time expected to be 10:45 or 11:00 a.m.

As far as we know, Portland will become the second city in the country to pass a peak oil resolution (after San Francisco a few weeks ago, see here:
http://energybulletin.net/15086.html).

-Background-

In January, Gene Berk of Portland Peak Oil drafted a one-sentence petition urging the City of Portland to create a task force to investigate the implications of peak oil for the citizens of the Portland metro area. PPO started circulating this petition and has collected over 600 signatures thanks to all of you. PPO then created a policy working group that had meetings with Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder, Commissioner Dan Saltzman and other government officials. From those meetings came the impetus to draft a resolution to create a peak oil task force. In February, Pam Leitch and David Cohan of PPO crafted the first draft of the resolution that was forwarded to Dan Saltzman’s office after input from others at PPO.

The past few months, Brendan Finn at Saltzman's office has been instrumental in moving the process along, including the vital step of winning support from the other commissioners and the mayor.

-Next Steps-

We strongly urge you to come down to City Hall on May 10 to show your support for the resolution. Dan Saltzman will make opening comments and introduce a panel. Daniel Lerch will make a short statement on behalf of Metro, Sue Anderson will speak on behalf of OSD, and someone from our Policy working group will speak about PPO and the process of how the resolution came to be and its importance. We will then place the petition signatures and letters of support on the record. Again, we encourage as many interested citizens as possible to attend and provide up to three minutes of testimony in support of the resolution. If you'll be attending, please check the online docket to be sure of the time (go here:
http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?c=26998)

Saltzman's office will be issuing a press release announcing the resolution next Tuesday and there will be a press release from our end around that time as well that we will submit to local press and national energy/peak oil news outlets.

Regarding the task force, the Office of Sustainable Development will be taking the lead with cooperation from the Bureau of Planning and the Office of Transportation. The Oregon Department of Energy and METRO will provide technical assistance. The task force will be comprised of up to 11 people representing diverse interests, but all on the same page regarding the seriousness of the issue at hand. We expect that there will be a few representatives from PPO on the task force and that PPO will have input into the make-up of the rest of the task force. If you have any suggestions as far as key individuals who should serve on the task force, please let us know by contacting taskforce@portlandpeakoil.org.

The timeline goals are a) to have the task force formed by a month from now, b) regular meetings throughout 2006, and c) policy recommendations back to Council before the end of the calendar year.

David Cohan has written a wonderful editorial on peak oil and the resolution that will appear in the Oregonian sometime early next week, so keep an eye out for that.

If you would like to read the final draft of the resolution that will be presented on Wednesday, please go here:
http://www.portlandpeakoil.org/files/Peakoilresolutionfinaldraft.doc

Thank you so much everyone for all of your support! This could not have been done without the tremendous "push from below". Hope to see you at City Hall next week!

The PPO Policy team,

Jonathan Brandt
David Cohan
Mike Dill
Jeremy O’Leary
Pam Leitch
Emily Pollard