 Welcome to Pathways to Progress. I'm here with City Councilor's Victoria Pelletier and Roberto Rodriguez. We're coming to you live from the Portland Media Center, and we're here to talk about current events in your city. So thanks for joining in. How's it been going, Roberto and Victoria? How's your summer been so far? It's been good so far. You know, we're like in the peak of summer right now. The Council, in the months of July and August, instead of having the two traditional separate meetings, we have them both on the same day, so it kind of takes away a little bit of our workload, but then it condenses all the work in one meeting. But other than that, you know, ongoing, to me it's been a great summer as far as work, but other than that, happy to be back here and hanging out with Victoria. Great. Yeah, it's been a busy summer, and I do like the summer meetings. I actually didn't know that we did that, and so when I found out that we have one in July, and one in August, and then we actually take August off from committee too, I thought that was cool. It's nice to be able to reset, because I know we're going to have a really busy fall. So anytime that we can kind of have a little bit of a break is nice, even though I predict our meeting next Monday will be very long, but I still think it's cool that they condense them and give us a little bit of time to enjoy summer. Great. And you went on some boats? I did. So that's part of it. I have had access to two boats, and it's very exciting, because normally I don't have access to any. And I think I realized I enjoy being on a boat with a nice beverage, and I was like, this is fun. Why don't I do this more often? So yeah, it was cool. And your summer as a dad has changed a bit because your daughter's about to enter high school? High school? Yeah. And so she got a transit pass from the school district at the beginning of summer. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I knew that she was going to enjoy using the pass, but just how independent she and her friends have been all summer long. So she's an eighth grader or rising eighth grader. So all the high school students in public schools use the metro for their public transportation or for their school transportation. So we give them these passes. And so this summer is intended for them to get familiar with it. And my daughter and her friends have just been all over the city in the bus. They go to the mall. And again, the purpose here is to encourage the use of public transportation from a young age and create that cultural shift. And if there are any indication, it's a ridiculous success. I mean, I'm proud of how independent these young people are. Yeah, it sounds like a great idea. We are going to have a traffic question here eventually. But if you're ready to address some of the questions that have trickled in over the month while we were preparing for the show, I'd like to know if you agree or disagree with Councillor Tae Chung has announced that he will not be running for reelection. And there was a Portland Press Herald interview, asking him to explain why. One of the things he said in that interview was, quote, it's a changing of the guard. The old council was about trying to work within the system. And the new council wants to change the system. End quote. Victoria, do you agree with that? Disagree with that? You know, I agree. And I think that that is perfectly acceptable and a good thing. I take that as a compliment. I'm not sure how it was meant, but I definitely take it as one. Because I think that that is a huge reason why I ran for office in the first place was to have systemic change. And I don't think that you can have anything real without that systemic shift. And it's going to, it does not come without growing pains. It doesn't come without challenging conversations. But again, I think we all went in there to do great work. And in order to do that and make it as equitable as possible and make it so that we can really shape Portland into being a city that represents everybody, you have to have systemic change. And so to play within the system that we're given almost feels like we're just going in there and kind of shifting things around, but they're still going to stay in the same place and have the same narrative. But to change the system in which things exist in, I think is what we're all trying to do. Outside of Portland nationally, there's always going to be a strive for systemic shift. And I think that that's something to get excited about because that changes how we look at local government. That changes how our representatives look. And I think that that's actually a good thing. So that's a huge reason why I personally got involved in local office. Okay, great. I agree 100%. And I think the opportunity that we have in office, in municipal office, the best way that we can take advantage of it is by looking at ways to have broad systemic impact. I think that it'd be literally a bad use of our time or a waste of our time to get lost in the minutiae of small little issues when we have this opportunity. And we do it not just in, he talked about changing of the guard as in the votes that we take in the council, but these are also really advantageous positions in being advocates. It connects us to different parts of the community. It connects us to people at the state level that are doing really important work at the legislature. So we want to have those connections. We want to be part of the web of systems that helps to change the way that things have worked out in the past because we've been long saying that it is those systemic inequities that we need to correct. And if we don't address it from that broad perspective, we'll never be able to really make the difference that people need us to make. Here's an unexpected question. Do you think that the person who will be elected to fill that seat is likely to be also someone who wants to change the system? I mean, I don't know anyone that would run for office if they thought everything was going well. So I think we all run for different reasons, but we all want to change something or we all want to enhance representation. What kind that is, I'm not sure. It will depend on who fills the seat. But I do think the current tone of the council right now, and I know when we were first running and campaigning, a lot of the narrative about us in the paper was like the most progressive council we've ever had and like what's going to happen with all of that. And so I do think people getting involved in local office are trying to change something. And I would hope that based on the systemic change that we're really trying to accomplish, that this new seat that is going to be filled is someone that also says, I'm ready to make longstanding, impactful systemic change that will lead to just a more equitable and more representative local government. And I don't want to play it safe within these systems that very often are keeping us exactly where they want us, because it just hasn't been... I mean it's working, it's working perfectly, and that's the reason why so many of us are still disenfranchised and we don't really have any strong, strong change into making Portland a place that really represents and supports everyone. So we'll see what happens with who fills the seat, but I'm hoping that they are looking to change the system in the ways that we are. What about you? Do you want to make any predictions here? Who are you going to endorse for this? Of the people that have taken out papers for the District 3, Regina Phillips, I know her personally. I am going to endorse her. I think very highly of her. I think that she is going to bring that perspective of how do we have a broad impact with our work, and I think she's going to represent that district incredibly well. So I'm actually really excited for her to be a candidate. And again, I'm confident that she'll bring that broad impact and rather that view of having a broad impact. Let's hope so. The next question is kind of, this is a good segue into the next question. This is from Marcos Miller. He lives on Monroe Hill. And he has said, the city seems to be in a holding pattern waiting for issues of the Charter Commission and city manager to be settled. City staffing is at about the 80% level and we seem unprepared to go after opportunities. How can this leadership come from City Hall or should it come from outside City Hall? You think about that. Are we in a kind of a holding pattern and is that a bad thing or appropriate? You know, I don't know. It's hard to say if it's like a bad thing or not. I think it's a reality. I think that because there is so much on the ballot through the Charter Commission questions that could change the structure of municipal government that perhaps there is maybe some hesitancy from folks about how much are we going to advance at this point knowing that there's uncertainty in November. At the same time, I think it'll be really bad practice to just kind of put everything on hold. So you both have to meet the immediate needs and also continue to have long-term planning, right? We have a comprehensive plan in the city that I think still guides our work primarily. So as long as we don't halt everything, I do think that it's important that we strike a balance between how much we commit and how much do we really need to be aware of the environment. I agree that things feel like there's not a lot of movement. I would maybe push back a little bit in saying that there is a lot going on. We are certainly not standing still as counselors. We're having conversations specifically about the impact of the different ways that the Charter Commission questions and even the citizens initiatives that are going to be on the ballot and the impact that those will have. So we're certainly working as a council and trying to figure out what our positions are going to be in terms of options that we have to impact the outcomes. I feel so busy. I feel like we have so much that we're doing. What's a polling matter? No, I mean, we have a lot that's happening. And I think as well, it does. I definitely can understand how that looks from the perspective of someone that is not in the council because it probably does look like we're all just on pause until the determinations are made in November. But we're working. We're having a ton of conversations. We're preparing for a very big meeting on the 8th of the citizens initiatives in depth. We're going to be talking about the Charter work in depth. We're going to be voting to see what we want to adopt and what we want to send to the voters. And so there's so much happening that if anything, I think we're in this prep mode of saying, here's what's to come. And we're just going to have meeting after meeting that's going to be long and intense and filled with public comment for the next several months until we get to election day. So I think the leadership within that definitely is and should be coming from within the walls of City Hall. But it also needs to be talked about within Portland because all of it is going to come to the voters in November. So people really need to start taking this time to educate themselves on what am I voting on? What are we talking about? What are the citizens initiatives? What is the Charter worked on? Let me read the report. This is really the time to get as much information as possible, attend as many meetings as possible because all of that determination of what we see, whether it is going to go to a strong mayor model and we're not going to have a city manager anymore is in the hands of everybody in Portland. So I would just encourage them, if it does feel like downtime, to definitely utilize that downtime to push forward and study as much as you can and ask us questions because we're going to be talking about it a lot at the upcoming meetings. I thought it was kind of an interesting question because summer in Maine is kind of downtime. We grow food, we go on boats, we relax a little bit from the... It's very intense to live here during the winter and it's just living as easier in the summer. But it's interesting that the fact that you have one meeting a month rather than two meetings a month really makes that one meeting a month like this avalanche of stuff to decide. So if I understand you correctly, this next meeting that's going to occur on Monday the 8th, after that voters would know which ones are going on to the ballot for them to vote on in November and which ones the city council is going to go ahead and act on, am I understanding that correctly? Yeah, we will be going through each citizen initiative and we'll have to determine whether we are adopting, adopting and amending or sending it to the ballot and that will also be the meeting where we'll have a public hearing and so there'll be public comment for people to weigh their input on what they think of the initiatives and what they're hoping that we do. And do people have to show up in person to do that now at your meeting in person or can they also do it over Zoom? We still have hybrid meetings so while we're meeting in chambers and while people are welcome to come in and I love when people come in so I just think it adds more when we have individuals there and we can see them and hear their voices, people can still call in because we'll still have a Zoom option so if individuals can't make it, they can still call and make their voices heard that way. Sounds like an exciting meeting. Hopefully it won't go until 1 a.m. Well, I know that you guys get a lot of criticism as city councilors and some of it is not even valid and when people say you have to represent me just because you gave a speech that they didn't agree with everything in that, you know, you represent people when you vote, you don't represent people when you're out there in your personal life being yourself anyway. Here's a compliment, this is one that's also from Marcos Miller of Monroe Hill. I appreciate your asking the Maine Turnpike Authority to hold off on the Gorm Turnpike, also known as the connector. That was a unanimous vote, wasn't it? That's the part that surprised me. Honestly, I didn't know much about the Gorm Connector. I'm like, they unanimously really? Linking this to expanding public transit makes sense, says Marcos. What wider roles do you see Portland being able to play to address regional sprawl, traffic congestion, and land use patterns? I think, well, at first I wanted to say that I think it was tough in that because we voted and it was unanimous and we were excited and we talked about how it's really important if we are going to take climate sustainability seriously that we have a study done before we move forward and I was just proud that we were all on the same page with that despite some public comment. I mean, the majority of public comment was good. I think it was just Peter Mills from the MTA that didn't love what we were saying. But what was challenging I think was afterwards I noticed we got a couple emails from people that don't live in Portland that live in Gorham and wanted the Connector and they were like, you're the Portland City Council. So I don't know why you're voting on anything that has to do with... They were like, I don't know if you know this, but you're Portland, you're not the Gorham City Council, you're not the South Portland City Council. So to address that question, it's tough because I want us to do so much and I want us to be a leader really when we're talking about traffic impacts and sustainability impacts and taking it seriously and leading that conversation and saying before we do anything, before we potentially cause a ton of congestion, how are we going to make sure that we're doing everything we need to do to make this as safe as possible and sustainable as possible. But the feedback that we got was also challenging because I do want us to have a regional presence, but it's hard if it's not multi-municipal and I would love for us all, from all of the councils that are going to be impacted to all be on the same page. I don't know if we are or we're not. I don't want to hear from any councilors, but I think that's the part that's hard, is I want us to really get involved, but then we get a little bit of pushback because people are like, you're not representing here, you are only representing what's happening in Portland. Well, transit by its nature is going to be regional. Well, they can build the Gorham Connector all they want to the edge of Gorham and then they have to stop because the other municipalities that they're going to go through, they have to have their buy-in. So hopefully, maybe people are disappointed that people in Gorham that we're like, oh, we're just waiting, we're waiting, because they already have the congestion and I saw a lot of online comments like, you cannot build your way, you cannot build roads to solve traffic congestion. Every city that's ever tried that just has more congestion on new and fancier roads. But of course, the people living in Gorham and along the way are like, get us out of this traffic nightmare. So what do you see as the role of the city of Portland here? What can they do? I mean, I think that that vote and using our organizations like GPCOG and the structures that are in place to talk to the regional agencies that work in transit and with the roads, that's exactly what we need to do. The different transportation agencies in the region, Metro and even the cruise lines, Casco Bay lines in South Portland and Old Orchard Beach, all of these folks, if they don't have an alignment in the way that they see the future of public transportation, they're going to be working in silos. And like you just said, these municipalities we're transporting the same folks to and from work and home and school and everything. So I think that if we can get them to align their vision into what public transportation should be in the future and how the role that it plays in city planning and road planning, but I don't see that alignment right now. I don't know if I mentioned in one of our shows in the PAC's policy board we had some ARPA funding to allocate. It was upwards of $8 million and there was like a clear distinction between those agencies that wanted to use that funding to use, you know, to invest in innovative ways to bring ridership back into public transit, right? Especially bringing them back post pandemic and then the folks that wanted to use that money to just continue their ongoing operations, kind of status quo. And it's like, no, this money from the Fed is specifically meant to make the improvements, to look forward to make the advancements in public transportation not to do the status quo. And so if in that room with that chunk of free money, people can't agree on it, you know, then that's the work that needs to get done. So that's one way to get there. A lot of the other online comments that I saw were things like it takes 10 years to build a light rail system, you know, they don't have well, then we should have started 10 years ago. But I mean, aren't we really in the short term talking about buses, possibly bus lanes that are dedicated and then, you know, energy efficient buses? That doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Right? It really doesn't. It doesn't, but no matter what, people are going to be upset. That's a given. But I mean, if you're talking about building a four, I believe it's a four-lane highway essentially, with limited access. If you're talking about building that just for cars where there's one or two people in them, clearly doing that without accommodating our existing public transit, you know, potential would be really foolish, wouldn't it? It would be bad for air quality. It would be just... One of the, I don't want to segue too far away from this, but you know, we have investments in, you know, the EV chargers, the electric vehicle charging stations. And that's considered to be, you know, a really positive move because we're talking about emissions and whatnot. But in essence, those are still autonomous vehicles. So as much... That's infrastructure that we're living with, and then you, you know, we just invested in a whole bunch of EV fast chargers. That means that those lanes for autonomous vehicles, we marry to them too. So we also have to be really thoughtful about when we're looking at taking steps forward, are we prioritizing buses? And, you know, like rail... Traffic jams do not prioritize, like, oh, it's an electric vehicle. I'll let them through. Like a traffic jam, is it? Traffic jam, right? Yeah. It's a thorny problem and definitely a regional problem. Here's another regional problem that's tricky in this. It'll probably be the last one we have time for. This question is from Pat Taub, who's one of your constituents in the West End. How can concerned residents of our city support the efforts of city government to alleviate the marked rise of unhoused people trying to survive in cars or on the street? Pat's a longtime resident of Portland. She's really not saying, get them out of my neighborhood. She's really saying, wow, there are so many more people living on the street this summer than I've seen before. What, how can we help you, the city, solve this problem? Or should we be down, pounding on doors in Augusta saying, this is not Portland's problem, this is Maine's problem? What would you suggest for the concerned citizen about housing right now? We all know it's a train wreck housing. We were just talking about before the need to look at these problems and how to have a systemic and broad impact. So I think that this is specifically a case where you do need to look at what is it that creates these ongoing homelessness issues and what is it that perpetuates the same folks having the same problems. And so that's one aspect of the work that I think it's quote unquote always ongoing and what we're kind of committed to doing. But then at the same time, probably more I'm thinking also part of what that question is alluding to is like how do we meet the immediate needs of these folks and that's sort of kind of like what can we do to help them get immediate shelter, food closing, things like that. I think at this point I'm going to really step aside and give Tori the floor. She's amazing she knows so much about local organizations and ways to be effective and so I'd love for her to just talk about ways that people can get involved to meet those immediate needs. We're lucky in Portland to have organizations that have been doing this work and advocacy for a really long time so I'm thinking immediately comes to my main needs which is working really hard to provide resources for individuals who are on house and asylum seekers and it's everything. It's clothing, it's books it's food. They're always posting and they're always advocating and so I'm just putting that out there for individuals to Google them or look them up on social media they always need help, they always need volunteers they always need donations and it's just a really really great organization that continuously provides any type of support to our on-house community and to our asylum seekers community I'm also thinking of main immigrant rights coalition which is another great organization that works really hard primarily for asylum seekers to provide resources and so again I know that in the past I think with us at the city we've done work with them and we've tried to highlight a lot of the stuff that they do but this is another really helpful organization and both of these main needs and main immigrant rights coalition and I would put Portland Housing Coalition in that as well are these advocacy groups and mutual aid groups that are working really hard to provide immediate resources to individuals so that they have food that's culturally specific so that they have clothing so that they have sunscreen and bug spray and all of these things that I think we just don't think of ourselves because we're privileged enough to have them and to not have to worry about having them so the smallest donations to these groups or the smallest kit to these groups they always like sometimes make it fun and say like we need kits of this or that it would go a long way to really providing immediate support for people that want to do on the ground work until we start to figure out what we can do regionally. I was just over the weekend a family member of mine was trying to advocate for a woman who'd been discharged from the ER at Main Med with a hotel voucher the patient was in a wheelchair and I think it had some kind of injury and the hotel wouldn't let them check in because they didn't have a credit card so there's this person with the hotel voucher now they can't you know they've been discharged from the ER and they've been resolved by communicating with a family member but it made me realize how those of us with privilege don't see those little built in structural barriers to getting shelter over your head even after you've been ill or you know it's a very complicated I have a lot of social work impulses but from working with real professional social work organizations and individuals over the years like that is a hard job you need real training for it and those people are always telling us we need resources we need resources the temporary emergency shelter that the state and the city were going to build apparently has now been scratched at least for the location that they had picked because there's some issues with renovating that building to work for that purpose it made me think when I heard that though that at least it did sound like someone in Augusta was listening when the city of Portland said we are now overwhelmed with asylum seekers we love them we want them but we cannot guarantee them housing we just are at capacity do you feel like that was heard a little bit perhaps you know I think maybe it is a good example of the regional approach and having our partners in the state help out it didn't work we still have the urgent need and thankfully the extension on being able to use the hotels it bothered us some time but I think it's it's still urgent that we augment that message and that we do think of it as a state problem as a national problem we cannot get lost in trying to identify once more ordinance or you've even seen the Green New Deal being blamed for it we can't get lost in those silly little arguments these are big issues that have so many impact or so many factors that impact how things work out and we have to think broadly again and the state being partners is crucial we cannot do it alone here well we are almost out of time it goes so fast when we are talking doesn't it it seems like we have been here for 10 minutes thanks so much for being here and giving us your thoughts and your best work I want to make sure and thank our producer and director Warren Edgar here at Portland Media Center and the Portland Media Center for allowing us to use their wonderful studio space we have a great tech crew on hand Dale Ashby and Jeffrey Cooper are here tonight to help us put the show out for you and please let me hear from you if you have questions you can get in their DEMs but they are very very busy and if you communicate your questions to me I am happy to bring them up and have them on the show in the future so thanks for watching, thanks for being with us take care, be well