Suzanne Thorson was at North Portland’s Good in the Hood parade earlier this summer when a young man approached her and asked her to sign a petition to “reduce emergency response times.” When she asked how that would happen, he said, “I guess hire more people.”

Thorson signed the petition, but the following day, she learned that it proposed diverting funds from the Portland Clean Energy Fund to hire more police.

“I was duped!” she wrote in her formal complaint to the Secretary of State Elections Office on June 28 detailing her experience. She requested to have her signature removed and said she no longer supported the measure.

Thorson’s is one of 97 official complaints filed with the state regarding the Enhanced Community Safety initiative, or the 1PDX2026 measure. State election officials say that’s the most complaints they’ve seen on a single petition since adopting a record-keeping system seven years ago.

The ballot initiative in question proposes using 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 police officers. That’s about $50 million that would be diverted from the city’s climate action fund each year.

Portland was the first city in the nation to launch a voter-approved climate justice fund in 2019. It’s fueled by a 1% tax on the retail sales of large Portland companies and is intended to help the city’s most vulnerable residents adapt to a changing climate, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But the fund, called PCEF for short, has brought in about $200 million a year — $140 million more than expected. It’s been eyed by city leaders, as well as city council candidates, to help fill the city’s widening budget gaps.

The most recent proposal — and the subject of the petition — is to use some of that money to increase police presence in Portland.

Controversy over signatures

Earlier this month, the group behind the police initiative, Safer Portland, announced it had collected more than 63,000 signatures from Portlanders in support of the measure.

If at least 40,437 of those signatures are validated by the Portland City Elections office, the measure will appear on the November ballot for voters to decide if climate funds should be used to boost the ranks of police officers.

The city has until Wednesday to complete its signature verification.

Those opposed to the initiative, however, are crying foul and say its backers hid key details in order to get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The initiative’s supporters, meanwhile, believe they are being unfairly targeted and say certain groups orchestrated an online campaign and solicited complaints about the signature-gathering to undermine their efforts.

The group has also accused the Portland City Elections office of “political bias” over the signature verification process, and has called on the Secretary of State to take over the process.

At the same time, a company hired by the campaign is facing its own accusations.

Measure to divert Portland climate funds to hire more police could be headed to voters in November

Three people hired by the third-party company that conducted the signature-gathering have also filed complaints with the state, and two of them reached by OPB said they have concerns about how they were trained to do the canvassing.

As accusations fly, the Secretary of State is reviewing the complaints about signature-gathering, and the campaign could face unspecified penalties depending on what the agency finds.

Record number of complaints

OPB obtained the 77 official complaints filed with the Oregon Secretary of State between May 12 through July 8 through a public records request. OPB has also requested the 20 additional complaints filed since July 8, but has not yet received them.

A review of the 77 complaints made available so far revealed that dozens of people felt lied to by signature canvassers, who were hired through a company called Fieldworks LLC. In those complaints, 65 people said they were misled about the petition or were not told exactly what the measure would do.

Supporters of the Safer Portland campaign are skeptical of all those accounts, as well as the 20 complaints OPB has not yet been able to review.

Elise Haas, campaign spokesperson, said the complaints were filed as part of an organized opposition from a group called Hands Off PCEF that is dedicated to defending the climate-justice fund. Haas called the complaints “manufactured” and said they represented a “miniscule number of people” amid the 63,000 who signed the petition.

“Our opponents are defending the status quo and trying to deny democracy to Portland voters,” she told OPB in an emailed statement.

Haas did not reply when asked about the allegations in the complaints that signature-gatherers were dishonest, or had misled voters. She instead referred OPB to a handful of social media posts that appear to encourage people to complain to the Oregon Secretary of State about the signature-gathering process. She shared screenshots of posts made on Instagram asking people to submit complaints.

Those screenshots include:

• An image of a July 9 X post by Portland Democratic Socialists of America that says “You can file a complaint here if you were misled” and links to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office
• A July 9 PDX for All post on Instagram that reads “If you were misled into signing, please contact the city to tell them that your signature is invalid and shouldn’t be accepted.”
• And a July 10 Instagram post by the Coalition of Communities of Color that says “TELL ELECTION OFFICIALS: Only accept signatures gathered lawfully.” The post shares a link to the Hands Off PCEF website.

According to an OPB analysis, 67 complaints were filed before Hands Off PCEF launched the social media campaign on July 6 asking people to report anomalies in their interactions with signature canvassers. That’s the same day Safer Portland submitted its signatures to the city.

Jenny Lee is a representative of the Hands Off PCEF campaign. She’s also the managing director for Building Power for Communities of Color. They are one of three organizations that challenged Safer Portland’s first attempt to collect signatures.

Lee said complaints have “arisen organically,” and her group launched an official campaign against the petition only after it learned that Safer Portland had submitted voter signatures.

Haas, of Safer Portland, did not respond to questions about the timing of the complaints.

Lee said she’s paying attention to how the state responds, and if the measure will make the November ballot.

“We have emphasized that it’s important that we communicate with our elections officials that they need to be fully investigated prior to verifying anything for the ballot,” she said.

Portland groups challenge proposal to divert climate action funds to hire police

The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office is reviewing the complaints, and there could be penalties if the state finds the campaign misled people about its purpose, said Connor Radnovich, agency spokesperson. When asked, he did not specify what those penalties could be.

Fieldworks LLC, the company hired to recruit and train canvassers, did not have a listed phone number for media contacts, only a number to text for support. OPB contacted this number with a request for comment and emailed twice over the course of a week, but did not hear back.

OPB also reached out to the Portland Police Association, which supports the initiative. It did not respond to requests for comment.

A proposal to hire more police

The Safer Portland official initiative summary focuses on the following:

• creating a new policy to have at least two sworn officers per 1,000 residents;
• using 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund to do so;
• And creating a new commission, that would be composed of the Portland mayor, police chief, city administrator, police union representative and one councilor, to recruit, hire, maintain and support the officers by 2030;

The summary, called a ballot title, does not make any mention of hiring 911 police dispatchers or funding for Portland Street Response.

But the campaign has emphasized that more police could support the work of mental health, addiction and medical professionals. It also says additional officers will help improve emergency response times, if it is able to divert what it considers “excess” yearly climate funds to hire more police officers.

The initiative is largely backed by the Community Safety Coalition PAC. It has raised $1.5 million, according to campaign finance records.

Portland currently has 313 patrol officers who respond to 911 calls. Overall, the city has 808 sworn police officers ranking from officer through chief. Last year, officers were dispatched to more than 221,000 calls.

Yet many of the complaints reviewed by OPB said canvassers did not mention the money would go toward hiring more police.

About 20 people said they were told the petition would hire more “911 dispatchers” to help reduce wait times.

Three people said canvassers claimed the Portland Clean Energy Fund was federally funded and that the money “was just sitting there.” PCEF is locally funded and its dollars are largely allocated through mid-2029.

One person said she specifically asked if the petition was to hire “police with badges and guns” and was told no. That person was one of 15 people among the 77 complaints reviewed by OPB who requested her signature be removed.

According to Oregon state law, signatures cannot be removed at the request of a signer after they have been submitted for verification.

Among those who filed complaints was Alex Island. She was walking out of Trader Joes in Northwest Portland when she recalls being asked about signing a petition that would shorten emergency wait times.

Island said she made a mental connection that the initiative was part of the Portland Street Response program. She said she did not remember hearing anything about hiring more police officers.

“Usually, I think I’d ask more follow up questions, but I was just like, in a rush and didn’t ask enough questions, which is my fault to some degree,” she told OPB.

A few days later, Island read a Portland Mercury article in which Portlanders alleged they were misled into signing a measure that would fund more police.

“I felt misled,” she said. “I usually trust that people who are asking to sign things are being truthful about what they’re asking me to sign.”

Haas with Safer Portland did not respond when asked to comment on complaints filed by people who said canvassers gave them inaccurate information.

At least five people who filed complaints also said canvassers became aggressive after they declined to sign.

In one complaint, a person wrote that after they declined to sign the petition, the canvasser yelled at them “saying that I better not call 911 ever even if I needed it because I didn’t support the initiative.”

Signature-gatherers also among those complaining

At least three former employees of the Fieldworks canvassing company also filed complaints with the state.

Brian Gardner, a former Fieldworks employee, said he’s worked as a canvasser on and off for the past 20 years — twice for Fieldworks.

On his first day of work, May 10, Gardner said he was given about 30 minutes of training and then sent out to collect signatures.

“I was thrown out into the street to ‘sink or swim’ which was fine with me because I’ve done this work a lot, but I also wasn’t given any background or explanation of what the initiative was,” Gardner said.

He said he was told he would be collecting signatures to make “Portland cleaner and safer” and that the money would come from a fund that “was overflowing with cash.”

“While I was out there collecting signatures is when I started doing some of my individual research because people are asking me questions like, ‘How are you going to make this street safer?’ And, ‘Where is the money going to come from?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell me that.’ So I had to look it up and discover it on my own,” he said.

When he came in for his second shift on May 15, he said, there was a new trainer teaching the recently recruited canvassers how to use a binder clip to cover up the word “police” on the signature page.

“They were highlighting that that was a thing that other people should do so that people didn’t see the word police on the signature page,” he said.

Gardner quit the job after working less than two days.

“There’s things that you sign on as a political worker and a campaign signature gatherer that say that you’re going to be honest and tell the signee the truth about the ballot initiative,” he said. “I have boundaries.”

In an email to Fieldworks, OPB outlined the allegations contained in the complaints and interviews with OPB. Those included that FieldWorks signature-gatherers had been trained to mislead people, that some people felt lied to or misled by canvassers and that some canvassers were aggressive while gathering signatures.

The company did not respond to multiple requests for comments over the course of more than a week.

Haas with Safer Portland also did not respond when asked to comment on complaints filed by signature gatherers, or to an emailed question about whether the campaign had input into the training provided by Fieldworks.

‘I’m still angry about it’

After Suzanne Thorson realized she signed something she did not agree with, she went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how to remove her name from the petition. While doing so, she decided to also file her formal complaint, she said.

“If someone would’ve said that they were going to take the Portland Clean Energy Funds to do that, I would say, ‘No, that’s not the way to do it,’” she told OPB.

Moving forward, Thorson said, she’s going to ask for every piece of information before she signs any other petition.

“I’m still angry about it,” she said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/31/portland-police-funding-initiative-accusations/