A Portland police-backed initiative to hire more officers using millions of dollars from the city’s climate action fund could be decided by voters in November.

The Enhanced Community Safety campaign announced Monday that the group has collected more than 62,000 signatures. That’s more than the 40,000 required to qualify for the November election. The campaign is led and supported by the Portland Police Association, car dealership owner Jeff Swickard, and former Portland city council candidate Bob Simril.

At a small gathering in downtown Portland on Monday morning, Simril and others with the group Safer Portland celebrated clearing the signature-gathering hurdle.

Simril said the signature count demonstrates that citizens want more police to investigate crimes and allay public drug use.

“Help is on the way to fix Portland’s police staffing and community crisis,” he said.

The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training. Safer Portland said the additional staffing will help make community policing, like working alongside mental health, addiction and medical professionals, possible.

Officials with the group have said additional officers can help improve emergency response times. They point to a recent city-led report that found high-priority calls now take an average of 20 minutes.

“Without enough officers, these longstanding initiatives are not possible,” Simril said. In addition to improved training, Simril said he hoped the additional funding would help the bureau hire and train more officers who are Portland locals.

But opponents of the initiative say the campaign is flawed and lacks clear language for residents to understand how this impacts the city’s climate action fund.

“We know that once voters hear the truth about this measure and how it is going to gut our climate justice efforts here in Portland, that it does not actually address real community safety, this is not something that voters would end up supporting,” Jenny Lee, deputy director of Coalition of Communities of Color, said.

The initiative — largely backed by the Community Safety Coalition PAC — has raised $1.5 million as of July 1, according to campaign finance records.

The Portland Elections Division has 30 days or until August 5 to verify the submitted signatures.

The Portland Police Association, which represents rank-and-file officers at the police bureau, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Diverting climate funds

The Portland Clean Energy Fund has long captivated the googly eyes of elected city leaders and city council candidates who have proposed using its $1.7 billion to fill the city’s budget gaps. It has even been named as a potential source of funds to repair an aging Moda Center to help keep the Portland Trail Blazers in town.

But the original intent of the Portland Clean Energy Fund, or PCEF, was to reduce the city’s carbon emissions while helping the most vulnerable residents adapt to a changing climate. It’s a first-of-its-kind climate justice fund that imposes a 1% tax on the retail sales of large companies in the city. It was approved with 65% of the votes in 2018.

PCEF funds a range of climate-related projects, including energy-efficient retrofits, renewable energy development, and job training in the construction and energy fields.

When it was first created, backers estimated it would generate up to $60 million a year, but it has instead generated hundreds of millions of dollars annually and grown into a $1.7 billion fund. All of that funding has been allocated in a five-year plan with funding going toward community grants, workforce development and energy efficiency.

Despite numerous past proposals to raid some of those dollars for other programs, the public safety initiative could pose the first real threat to PCEF’s funding — about $50 million a year, Lee said.

If voters approve the measure in November, Lee said, many climate-related programs will be affected.

“Those cuts will have to come from somewhere,” she said. “So this is absolutely the threat where we’re really seeing it break away from the importance of helping cleaner air, cleaner water, reducing heat in our city and helping folks afford their utility bills.”

Lee was one of the three people who challenged the first attempt to collect signatures for the public safety initiative.

In February, a judge found that the first policing initiative proposal lacked the full text necessary to meet ballot language requirements. But the Enhanced Community Safety campaign quickly filed a new petition and was approved to begin collecting signatures.

Now, Lee said, Coalition of Communities of Color and other groups that helped create and pass PCEF in 2018 will work together once again.

“We will be launching a full campaign to make sure that Portland voters hear the truth about the damage that this measure is going to do to the Portland Clean Energy Fund and mount a full-fledged effort,” Lee said. “We’ve done that before.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/06/measure-to-divert-portland-climate-funds-to-hire-more-police-could-be-headed-to-voters-in-november/