With some caveats, Metro councilors gave a thumbs-up Thursday to the criteria regional leaders will use to evaluate plans to curb tailpipe emissions.
Staff from Metro's Planning and Development Department, which is leading the Climate Smart Communities program, presented the criteria at a Metro Council work session Thursday. The criteria had previously been presented to the Metro Policy Advisory Committee.
Under the criteria, to be used as part of evaluating the Climate Smart Communities scenarios, Metro staffers will look at how proposals for curbing tailpipe emissions would affect things like the economy, public health and social equity.
The economic impacts were first on the mind of Councilor Craig Dirksen, who said he was concerned about the potential impacts of reducing tailpipe emissions on the economic competiveness of the region.
"If we put additional requirements or demands on business, do we end up being competitive or getting out of competition with the rest of the world?" Dirksen asked.
The project has six economy-related evaluation criteria planned: transportation costs, other infrastructure costs, social costs on various demographic groups, household cost burden, freight delay costs and transportation revenues per capita.
It also will look at how potential tailpipe emission plans could impact the number of jobs and where they're located, employment proximity to labor markets and access to retail areas and jobs within a half mile of homes.
Metro Council President Tom Hughes said the impacts of green regulation can be hard to measure. He said the Portland region's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions are attractive to business leaders around the world.
"Whatever minuses might exist in additional levels of regulation, or additional levels of concerns about those issues… you create opportunities based on our reputation as a place that takes this stuff seriously," he said. "Both of those are a little ethereal."
Less ethereal would be the impacts of increasing transportation costs on low-income households, particularly if the residents of those homes live far from where they work. Councilor Shirley Craddick wanted to ensure the analysis would show how certain strategies could impact parts of the region differently.
Because her district, on the region's east side, has fewer jobs, she worried that efforts to discourage driving and promote alternative modes of transportation could impact the people of her district.
"Is this going to make it even more challenging for them to get to their jobs, find a job and so on?" Craddick asked.
Politics were also a point of interest at Thursday's council discussion. Councilor Bob Stacey suggested staff should keep its analysis of political feasibility to a minimum, and let elected officials worry about whether ways of curbing tailpipe emissions could pass political muster.
"If we truly believe the elements being considered for one or more of the scenarios can't be undertaken in this political climate, that's highly relevant in factoring our landing place," Stacey said.
Robin McArthur, Metro's planning director, said much of that level of analysis will be on a technical level.
"What comes back to us is, maybe Hillsboro can do it (a given way of curbing emissions) because they're already doing it, and maybe because they're doing it, another community that hadn't thought of that can do it," McArthur said. Planning staff has suggested any final strategy for curbing tailpipe emissions take a "toolkit" approach, where communities could select what methods work best for them to curb emissions.
The Metro Council is scheduled to formally vote on the proposed evaluation criteria at its June 6 meeting.