Readers respond: Clean Energy Fund’s failed promise

So Andrea Durbin, director of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability who was charged with oversight of the Portland Clean Energy Fund, has been gently ushered out, with almost $200,000 in severance pay (“Portland planning bureau director departs with $195K severance amid climate change program problems,” March 15). The Clean Energy Fund ballot measure, passed in 2018, was put forward by organizers as a climate bill and a green-energy jobs bill. Predictably, in progressive Portland, voters passed it with a 65% vote, trusting that the laudable goals would be served. But the fund was terribly flawed from the get-go. Volunteers, not a paid staff, were to give out grants, and there were no systems put in place to evaluate beneficiaries, as laid out in the measure. There was no stated goal of the specific emissions reductions expected. The promise of “green jobs” was…

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