Mitch Green, incumbent, is the son of a union pipefitter. After serving in the Army, he became an energy economist at Bonneville Power Administration. Running for city council two years ago, he was embraced by building trades unions, but this year IBEW Local 48 and Ironworkers Local 29 pulled their endorsement after he voted against a bond to pay for the Bull Run Water Filtration Project and spoke against city funding for a Moda Center renovation. Green says his support for the union trades is undiminished, and if re-elected he wants to work on renewing and improving the regional workforce equity agreement, a quasi project labor agreement. He opposes more funding for police, and signed the ‘no police union money’ pledge, but has made frequent visits to city work sites to talk with rank-and-file members of unions like Laborers Local 483.
The Labor Press spoke with him via Zoom Oct. 10.
Labor organization endorsers: AAUP PSU, AFSCME, AFSCME 189 (1 of 4), AFT, AFT/PCCFFAP, IBT 37, LIUNA 483, OEA/PAT, PROTEC17, SEIU
More: mitch4portland.com
DON McINTOSH, NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS: As a city council member, what are you hearing from organized labor? What’s been the agenda?
MITCH GREEN: Earlier in the year there was a lot of attention on the regional workforce equity agreement (a multi-jurisdictional compact harmonizing labor standards and community benefits in local government construction work), making sure that when we engage in questions about disparity in contracting, we remember that project labor agreements and community benefit agreements are good at ensuring the right outcomes. More recently there’s been some tension with some of the craft unions with my positions on some specific projects.
We can jump into that. Remind me, you have a relative that was a union pipefitter?
My dad was a UA Local 290 member. My brother is a member of UA Local 32 in Seattle. And I have at least two cousins that are members of 290.
Have they endorsed you?
My dad has endorsed me. But Local 290 has not endorsed me. They endorsed me last time and chose not to endorse me after my endorsements were rescinded from IBEW 48 and Ironworkers.
My sense is that two years ago, you were warmly embraced by building trades unions. Maybe the family connection made a difference, or what you had to say. Two things I have heard put a chill on it. You became a critic of the ongoing Bull Run Water Filtration project. And you’re critical of the plan for the city to pay for Moda Center renovations. Can we talk about Bull Run first?
I’ve been nervous about the Bull Run project as soon as I became aware of it, not because I don’t want to do infrastructure work, but because of the cost. The cost just multiplied multiple times over. With my background in working for a utility, I understand what that does to rates, so when the financing package finally came to the transportation and infrastructure committee of which I was a member, you look at the ordinance language, and it says here’s what it’s going to do to the rates — 10% per year annual increases in the water rate for the foreseeable future. I did the math, and that just doubles the water bill in seven years. So I started to say, “Hold on a second, is there some way we can get some control around this thing?” So I voted no on that bond package. I asked to see if there were any other any other alternatives that we could pursue to make this a lower cost project for ratepayers. You know, working people are also ratepayers, right? And I think because of that, that really drew the ire. I had a conversation with Randall Friesen of the Columbia-Pacific Building Trades, and he was like, “Man, what’s going on here?” And I was like, “Here’s what I think. I know you guys are gonna be disappointed, but I think that if we continue to approve things that raise people’s rates this much, that continue to cost two 3, 4, times as much as they originally thought, then they’re going to start to say no to the next project. They’re going to start to say no to the next housing bond and the sort of tax increases that we need to do to pay for these things, and that chokes off the next generation of work. I also recognize that I didn’t necessarily have that conversation in advance.
Was that maybe a misstep?
It was, and I acknowledge that, no question. The same thing with talking to the electricians. I think that was an area of lost trust. But I do have a principled basis for saying I can’t in good conscience just ignore what I know about infrastructure finance. If there’s a way to do it less expensive while maintaining our labor standards, let’s always do that.
On Bull Run, it was thought of as a routine approval of a bond that would be necessary to fund the project. And were you the only vote against it?
No, I think Jamie Dunphy and Angelita Morillo also voted against it.
Approving the bond is like paying the bill when it’s due. Are you saying that you wanted to stop the already-under-way construction on the already-approved project?
Yeah, I wanted to see if there was any opportunity to find if there’s any unexplored pathway that could still solve our problem and lower costs for ratepayers. If not, fine.
So the bond vote was like a “stop the train” kind of move so that you could get that conversation.
Yeah, but it wasn’t an objection to the particular bond. I voted no on that bond in that moment, but I said, “Look, before this comes to the full council, please do some sort of analysis for me. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”
Has there been any responsiveness to that? Is anybody going to cooperate and look at cost savings with you?
They did. The deputy city administrator Priya Dhanapal, who no longer is with the city, she was the one in charge of it all at the time. They did hustle. They whipped together an analysis and said, “Hey, here’s this thing you wanted to have us explore, we penciled it out. We did the math. It’s not more cost effective than the current trajectory.”
If you had that information earlier, would you have voted differently on the bond?
I probably would have voted differently on the bond had had they been able to show all of that due diligence ahead of time. My no vote in that moment was just sort of a recognition I can’t rubber stamp things.
Lots of Portlanders are amazed when they get their water bills. Nobody’s ever gotten sick from cryptosporidium, but here’s this federal regulation that says you have to treat it. There was a much cheaper means of doing that, but the previous city council decided to look at earthquake and wildfire mitigation because we might get a situation with turbidity and soil getting into the watershed, so we’ve got a filtration treatment plan. They went with the Cadillac option that has some very laudable objectives, but that ends up being extraordinarily expensive at a time when ratepayers are still paying for the Big Pipe. The trouble arises from the fact that they literally already had the project underway, and it was stopped for six months. People were literally out of work because of some pretty technical objections that didn’t end up getting sustained in the land use process. It’s really frustrating when there’s not just Monday morning quarterbacking but three-year-later quarterbacking — the idea that we shouldn’t go forward with a project that’s already got earthmovers on site.
I want to acknowledge the frustration. What I told Garth (Bachman, top elected officer of IBEW Local 48), what I told Randall, was ‘I get it, and your members are going to be mad, and I’m not going to try to be defensive about that. I’m going to continue to be at the table for everything that we want to work together on, like when we do the RWEA (regional workforce equity agreement renewal), let’s do it together.
It sucks to lose some endorsements from craft unions. There’s a personal connection for me. But it doesn’t mean I’m against the building trades. Whenever we’re gonna be able to work together, I’m gonna go to the mat for you.
So the Bull Run vote was the first difficulty in the relationship.
I think so, and then I think the the straw that broke the camel’s back was the Moda Center stuff.
It was your appearance at a rally against the city paying for renovations, right?
Yeah.
Our readers are probably divided on this question. Why was your vote against it the right one?
Well, I just think that the billionaire who bought this team bought it because he wanted to flip it and find a place to move this team. I think that’s what’s going on. That’s what just happened in Los Angeles, and you can get more money when you flip a team if you can get the municipality to pay for the upgrade of a stadium. I think that was always the play, and I think that the history of cities putting in public money for stadiums has borne out no evidence of positive net economic return from those things. And at the same time, you’ve got other areas of your local economy that are underinvested in. There’s infrastructure jobs that go unfilled. You know, your roads are crumbling. We got 14 schools being closed. So it’s just really hard for me as someone who’s trained in this stuff to say enthusiastically, “let me just embrace this and take all the talking points from the Blazers lobbyists without a critical lens.” That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a labor leverage point on this. From the very beginning, I was supportive of a deal that had a labor peace agreement and a project labor agreement on it. It’s just that I think that if you play hardball, you can get the ownership group to pony up a significant chunk of that, and you can still get the jobs, you still get the work, and then you get a better outcome from it, and then taxpayers feel better. And I still think we have that opportunity, and that’s why I was like, if we can organize …. You know, I’m an organizer. I’m an activist before I was a city councilor. So I’m going to be at rallies. I’m going to use my voice to raise things up. That’s my style. That’s different than going into the back room and working out deals between parties. And I think it’s important to do that so you can communicate to the public where you stand, and this city is divided on that. There’s a lot of people who are pretty outraged that the city has basically said, “Here’s a $400 million check.” Especially knowing that the work that needs to be done to modernize the stadium is about $165 million. I guess you could make the argument it’s closer to $180 million, but that’s what came out of the facilities condition assessment. But the full package that was floated was $120 million up front from the city plus another $275 million over the course of the next 20 years for new upgrades that are not yet contemplated. That’s for like C suites. That’s for extras that are just not necessarily about modernization. If we keep just signing blank checks to things without using our oversight lens as councilors, then Portlanders are going to continue to believe that we can’t spend their dollars wisely. And then they’re going to say no when we need them to say yes to the next bond or the next tax measure that’s going to invest in the generation of housing and other infrastructure work that we need to get done. So I think we’re in a really dangerous place where if you gamble with that, then you lose the trust of the public. I think we’ve pretty much lost it, and we need to build it back.
Is there an appropriate role for individual city council members or the council as a whole to weigh in on collective bargaining between the city and its unions?
Well, we have these conversations in executive session. And my position in those sessions has always been, “you need to take a look at your span of control (the number of workers a manager is responsible for overseeing in an organization) and administrative bloat before you start to try to balance the budget on the backs of these workers. That’s what I’ve communicated in the executive sessions. And what’s really challenging is you can’t take a vote in that executive session. So council can’t formally say, “here’s what we’re prepared to offer.” You can sort of indicate that. You can make gestures and be like “this is my position as an individual councilor,” and then they have to read the tea leaves. At the end of the day, the mayor and the city administrator are like, “We either have a clear sense from the council that they want to go bigger, or if there’s mixed opinions, then we’re just going to drive the ship.”
I think the very first thing I did in office was author a resolution with Eric Zimmerman revoking the city attorney’s right to file an unfair labor practice (charge) against AFSCME Local 189 for a practice picket.
Yeah, we reported on that at the time. You’ve had two years in a row of really painful budget discussions where the question is, “How many folks will I lay off this year?” Big picture, how would you describe the budget fight year one and year two, and your role in it?
I think that there has been a division around how deferential to the mayor city councils are. I’m not trying to inflame anyone or impugn anyone’s character, but I do think there’s legitimate differences in philosophy on like, “Hey, this is the mayor’s budget. Don’t come in with big swings. Let’s trust the guy. We should influence the budget before he presents it.” That’s one theory. And to the extent that I can influence his ideas before he presents it, I’m gonna. But if he presents a budget that I don’t like, I’m going to use every lever I can to change it. So for my part, I was really disappointed in the last one in particular that there were such deep cuts without touching at all upper management, or frankly any level of management. And also this really haphazard core services realignment consolidation work — they just brought in an external consultant, didn’t talk to labor in any meaningful way, and just said, “Congrats, here you go. You’re getting reorg. You’re getting consolidated. You’re getting fired.” And that’s how it went. So I brought in some amendments, and I worked with councilors who were willing to change that. It happened to be the sort of “Peacock” (Progressive Caucus) left flank of the council that wanted to do those changes, and I typically vote with them most of the time. And that was the point of high drama. I think that there were some areas where we agreed. Like I think the other side was doing a lot of efforts to restore the fire engine (the mayor’s initial budget proposal including removing a fire engine from a station in St. Johns), the kind of the deep cuts to the Portland Police Bureau in the non-sworn ranks. I also was bringing forward amendments to restore those positions as well, but I was trying to pay for them with cuts to management and cuts to other parts of the city budget that I thought that we should be looking at rather than draw from the unspent balances of the police accountability board.
And you couldn’t get majority buy-in for some of those offsets.
No.
Is there a Mitch Green fingerprint on either of the two budgets, where you sponsored a resolution or amendment that made a tangible change in the budget?
There was one amendment that I did get approved in the last budget, which was reducing the campsite sweeps budget by $1 million, which seems like a lot, but it was a big budget, and I reduced that to pay for sanitation work, 24/7 toilets, laundry facilities for folks who are living unhoused to have an opportunity to get their shit together. There’s great organizations doing this work in Old Town who are providing a labor income for people who are excluded from the labor market because they have serious challenges, but who want to work. Ground Score Association is one of those organizations. I was surprised to get seven votes on that, and I was pretty pleased. The other big imprint was I got a budget note passed, which directed the city administrator to do what I’m calling the “chop from the top” analysis. I failed to pass the budget amendment that chopped from the top, but the budget note did pass, and it said you’re going to look at all managers and come back ahead of the next budget with a plan.
Is there a revenue proposal that might get you out of the structural deficit and austerity?
I’m glad you asked. I’ve actually got one that I introduced last week. We’re calling it the fair share tax. And basically, what it does is, we currently have a a CEO pay ratio surtax on the books. But that’s pretty mild. So if you’re a publicly traded corporation and you pay your CEO 100 times your median worker, then you have to pay some small surcharge. We brought forward an ordinance that jacks that way up, and it says, look if you’re 50 to one, you’re going to start to pay the surcharge. But if you get to 100 to one, or 250 to one, or even 500 to 1 and up, then you’re going to pay 100% surcharge, a 250% surcharge, or a 500% surcharge on the base BLT (business license tax). What that does is create a progressive profit tax on large corporations, but only large corporations that are publicly traded. So it doesn’t even get into PGE, Northwest Natural, any kind of local firm, and it’s going to raise, we’ve done the math …
Why doesn’t it get to PGE?
Because their CEO doesn’t make more than 50 times their median worker. Maria Pope is well paid, but so is the median salary of PGE.
We tried to design this in a way that didn’t necessarily hurt our local headquartered firms. Especially if you’re a utility, because then you’re probably going to pass that on directly to ratepayers. But we’re really going after the Amazons, the Walmarts, the big banks, insurance companies. Basically, if you do business in the city of Portland and you’re a giant mega corp online retailer, you have to pay the tax, and the only way you can avoid it is by paying your workers more, your CEO less, or turning off your apps and not participating in the Portland market, and that’s just not going to happen.
You could also avoid it by not being publicly traded, though, right? Like if private equity takes a company private, then they don’t have to pay.
That is true. The way that this works is you get the data through Dodd-Frank federal compliance reporting. A private firm, you don’t have those books. They’re not required to disclose,
And (the ordinance) is paired with a tax exemption for small businesses under $500,000. So after all that tax cut and that tax hike, the net impact is $72 million per year in new general fund resources. There will be some lean years, there will be some high years, but that’s actually how you get off this roller coaster.
It is a tax on inequality to a certain degree. Taxes on profits at that scale for that large of a corporation are typically not passed on to customers. They’re absorbed by shareholders basically, partly because they need to remain competitive in these regional markets. It’s a pretty good way to keep some of that value from being extracted from the local economy and keep those dollars flowing locally. And I make no apology for that.
You said the expected net would be something in the range of $70 million, but wasn’t the shortfall this year alone like $160 million?
It was. Part of that was driven by one-time, like the shelter system for instance is like $60 million. And that doesn’t have an ongoing resource, so we have to have a conversation about whether we’re going to continue to fund that in addition to what the county’s doing, or if we’re going to do something different. We do have to make cost cuts in the City of Portland. You can’t just tax your way out of it. We have to create conditions of growth. But it’s hard to be an attractive place to invest, and it’s hard to be an attractive place to raise your family, if you can’t fill your potholes, if you can’t keep schools open. I know that’s not the city of Portland’s direct responsibility, but for the love of God, if we can come up with $120 million for a stadium deal out of nowhere … I mean, people would be right to ask, well, why can’t we keep my middle school open that my kid’s going to? Those are the stakes, so I think if people leave because they’re frustrated with our priorities and we don’t have money to invest in our core services, then that also is a drag on your economy.
What’s the biggest thing that City Council can do for working people in Portland?
I think that we need to address affordability head-on, and that’s why I have been focused on the water rate. I do have some expertise in rate design, and I know that the way that we currently charge people rates can be improved, so I’ve been leading along with Tiffany Koyama Lane, we’ve been thinking together on how do we develop a more formal rate-setting process, and talking to the utility managers saying “let’s get a tiered rate system, so the folks who use the most water can pay a little bit more, and those who are residential payers can pay a little bit less.” I think if we do some of that, that can make a big difference in people’s lives. And when we build economic development strategies, we should be prioritizing local businesses and local contractors. I mean, if you’ll notice, the city administrator has chosen a Canadian contracting firm for the Moda Center.
You’re having what they’re calling a bummer summer. I guess it’s now fall. But when it comes to the tweets (Green posted in 2020 and 2021 that he had “pure hatred” for the Portland police and called officers “absolute monsters,” “bastards,” and “infamously cowardly”) the Portland Police Association and the firefighters union called for your resignation. Apparently you were not persuaded this was the time for that. But I just wanted to ask you about that. It was maybe pretty hurtful, if you were a police officer, to read that. Is there anything you want to say to put that into context? Because they are union members.
I’ll just say that those tweets were made by a private citizen six years ago in the middle of the largest uprising for racial justice and movement against police brutality in the history of the United States. It was also in a summer where I was personally being teargassed and watching police officers beat journalists unprovoked. So I felt pretty mad, and I was pretty frustrated. And I think that I was channeling the general opinion of most Portlanders at the time. If I was making statements like that now as a sitting councilor, that’d be pretty unacceptable, right? I’ve had the opportunity to get to know individual police officers, in my work as a councilor, who believe in this city and want to do right by folks and who care about their work, and I think that’s very honorable. It’s the institution of policing though that I’m going to remain critical of, and that’s my job to be critical of and work towards a world where we can have far fewer interactions with the police and far more investing in education, systems of care. You can’t turn that switch off overnight. If you look at the votes I’ve actually made, I’ve invested in public safety. I haven’t brought forward a “defund the police” package. And people can have their feelings and opinions about it. But I think it’s off base to say, hey, these tweets from six years ago are disqualifying for a sitting city councilor. My record is somebody with grace and candor, somebody who’s been fair. You know, frankly, I brought forward a budget amendment in the first year that resulted in hiring 25 new police officers and 20 new firefighters because I moved money that was going to be spent on overtime for police into a fund to recruit public safety more broadly. And we made some permanent hires. So people can judge me on my record.
You said you had a career as an activist. I was aware of you being an economist at the Bonneville Power Administration. What was your activist career?
I’m probably not known for it but I was in informal protest spaces. When I got out of the army and I started going back to school that was about the time of the Great Recession. That was right around when Occupy (Wall Street) was starting, and so I cut my teeth in activism with Occupy, and I was in Kansas City at the time. I did some marches. I hung out at an encampment by the Kansas City Federal Reserve. And I was inspired by all that. And then I got into left labor political theory, and have been an organizer and activist for causes since. And I joined Portland DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) when I came back to Portland, largely in an anti-war capacity and labor capacity, nothing notable. But if you saw a big protest, I was there.
Are there any initiatives that you undertook in the last two years that matter to unions or working people that we haven’t discussed?
Yeah, one of the things that I’ve been pushing on a lot is making it as easy as possible to build in the city of Portland. One of the things that I’m pretty proud of that I achieved recently was passing this resolution to upzone the Inner East Side. It’s the Inner East Side for All zoning and code acceleration. It’s not a very sexy name, but it’s basically a resolution directing the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to bring us back some zoning maps, as soon as possible, like nine months from now, for council to vote on that. That makes it so you can actually go four floors and a corner store in the inner east side. It has not been legal to build apartments basically of any scale in in a big chunk from Irvington down to Division out to like 60th — a big chunk of Portland that is stuck in a kind of single-family, low-density zoning track. And that’s made it much more expensive to build, and it’s choked off the ability to do residential and frankly also commercial construction.
I’ve also just offered a lot of amendments as they come through to remove red tape and barriers to getting access to middle income housing finance from the State of Oregon. I just don’t want there to be a reason why some developer can’t come forward and say “I want to do this project.” I want us to be able to build. Those are things that the city has direct control over, and that costs us very little.
I was also a big supporter of the suspension of the system development charge for residential construction. I’ve been pushing that since I was on the campaign trail, and was happy to vote for it when the mayor brought it forward. And that’s made it easier to build as well. So there’s a lot of stuff on the residential multifamily construction side that I’ve pushed from a zoning and code update standpoint, as well as doing oversight.
