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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (July 13, 2022)
July 13, 2022 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3 News cont’d from pg 1 Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chair, said it had notified the Justice Department that Trump had contacted the wit- ness who has yet to ap- pear in public. “We will take any effort to influence witness tes- timony very seriously,” said Cheney, a Wyoming Republican. “ We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seri- ously A Trump spokesper- son did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Justice De- partment spokesman Anthony Coley declined to comment when asked if the department was in- vestigating the call. The hearing Tuesday was the seventh for the Jan. 6 committee, which is portraying the defeat- ed Trump as “detached from reality,” clinging to false claims of voter fraud and working fe- verishly to reverse his election defeat. It all led to his “be there, will be wild” tweet summoning supporters to Washing- ton. The panel delved into a critical three weeks of secret planning in the run-up to the Capitol at- tack and heard remorse- ful testimony from an Ohio father who believed Trump’s election lies and answered the defeated president’s tweet to come to Washington. The pan- el also heard form a for- mer spokesman for the extremist Oath Keepers Solar who warned of the far- right group’s ability for violence. “I think we need to quit mincing words about just talk. ... What it was going to be was an armed revolution,” said Jason Van Tatenhove. “I mean, people died that day.” Tuesday’s session fo- cused in part on Decem- ber 2020, a time when many Republicans were moving on from the No- vember election Trump lost to Joe Biden. Testi- mony brought out de- tails of a late night Dec. 18 meeting at the White House with Trump’s pri- vate lawyers suggesting he order the U.S. mili- tary to seize state voting machines in an unprec- edented effort to pursue his false claims of voter fraud . The panel featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel at the time, recalling the explosive meeting when Trump’s outside legal team brought a draft ex- ecutive order to seize the states’ voting machines — a “terrible idea,” Cipol- lone said. “That’s not how we do things in the United States,” he testified. Another former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, called the meeting “unhinged” in separate video testimo- ny. Cipollone and other White House officials scrambled to intervene as Trump met late into the night with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired nation- al security aide Michael Flynn and the former head of the online retail company Overstock. It erupted in shouting and screaming, another aide testified. PHOTO COURTESY OF PCC Jan 6 Center to be Affordable Housing Hub The Portland Metropolitan Workforce Training Center (PMWTC)—currently under construction in the Cully neighborhood of Northeast Portland—is an excellent example of a project that will help solve the housing issue. PMWTC will include 84 affordable housing units and other supportive services to be accessed by surrounding communities. The college partnered with Home Forward to develop and manage the affordable housing community at this site, with substantial help from NAYA and Living Cully. The affordable housing building, adjacent to the PMWTC, will feature larger units that can accommodate families with children, as well as roommates, and will have units set aside for families involved in the foster care system. OCF cont’d from pg 1 I’ll talk to anybody from Oregon. So when I started my conversa- tions, it was about my home state, which I love. But I think when I learned that it was a foundation committed to advancing oppor- tunity across the state, advancing opportunity in both rural and ur- ban areas, that appealed to me be- cause those have been really my life’s work – real solutions to ad- vancing opportunity. And when I learned what OCF had been doing at a hard time in our state, work- ing across the pandemic, working on issues of housing, working af- ter the fires, being a resource for the state in a powerful way, that really appealed to me. Working in every county in Or- egon is very rare. What struck me about OCF was having a staff that’s resident throughout the state, not just trying to do every- thing from Portland. What struck me about the OCF was its nimbleness in a pandemic, that when people weren’t even in the office, (OCF) was still being a strong partner to state govern- ment. And what struck me about it was its breadth. Working on issues of housing, but also fund- ing musical instruments for kids. Those are some early impres- sions I had – breadth of work and exciting history of partnership. “ “My optimism is not unfounded TSN: You are the daughter of an immigrant. How has that influ- enced your professional trajecto- ry? LM: My dad was from Ghana, and he came to Oregon in the 1950s, before Ghana was even independent. I think the first influence was that my dad was very visionary, and he knew that very few people get a chance to make big changes, and I think he instilled in all of us siblings that urgency to use what you’re giv- en to really improve the world. And he said that’s actually why he chose engineering. He was an Or- egon State Beaver, and he was an engineer. He said engineers help make the world better. And so I got a heavy dose of “take nothing for granted” and “make the world better.” But I also lived in Ghana as a child, and I think I’ve had an abid- ing interest in questions of devel- opment. Who is poor and why? Because it’s been around me. Not everybody gets dealt the same hand, and that’s true globally and that’s true within our country. It gave me a real hunger to work on the deep solutions to inequality and poverty. TSN: How did you go from working in banking to serving as the undersecretary of rural de- velopment under Obama? LM: My experience in banking and the whole side of it that I did at the Ford Foundation – which was really investing in rural com- munities by supporting lending organizations – was actually the perfect background for that side of the agriculture department. Read more at TheSkanner.com cont’d from pg 1 rooftop solar installation. Other Clean Energy Fund projects in- clude an initiative under the city’s Heat Response Program to install 15,000 portable cooling units to vulnerable residents. “It was all wonderful, and then we got to see ‘ok, where’s the missing pieces? What about the city of Portland? What are your guys’ resources? How can we tap into more than just one – do you all know what each other is doing?’” Rob- erts said. “So it spurred the other city bureaus talking amongst one another, and it was because we asked, how can we connect, instead of running around from this bureau to that bureau? We wanted to create this chain reaction, so (homeowners) find out if you can also qualify for one thing, you can also qual- ify for this and this. And it wasn’t just for us – what about those homeowners who aren’t connected with us? Good things came out of that project.” She added, “We were figuring out ways that they could be more stream- lined to address the needs of African Americans. The vision is the same right now with everyone, it’s pretty much eq- uity and inclusion, so it’s like, how do you really make that happen?” “ We helped save the home and that gen- erational wealth Deferred Maintenance AAAH is a nonprofit that provides services for first-time homebuyers, as well as homeowners at risk of foreclo- sure. The organization also provides free estate planning and home reten- tion counseling. “We don’t have funds to help every- one with a ticket price of $12,000, but we can help you with a matched savings program,” Roberts said. “We’re com- bining these resources, stacking them together to make it possible. All home- owners have to do is save their money and we help with the process, project management, making sure we go step by step for what they need.” And in implementing new programs like Clean Energy, the organization has discovered what a prevalent issue de- ferred maintenance is. “We offer free energy assessments,” Roberts said, “and so in that, and the Water Leak program, we find we open up a can of worms. When you talk to a homeowner in need, they may come to you for a water leak, but I always ask them what other issues they’re con- cerned about. And sure enough there’s always more.” Roberts estimates that of the homes they’ve served, only about 10% would be ready for the addition of solar up- grades. “Deferred maintenance has become a priority for us because again, there’s no sense putting solar on a home that has what I call leaks – that doesn’t have insulation, that has bad windows. It’s just defeating your purpose. So we have to take care of that first. I know we did not think it was so prevalent, but we had to go back to PCEF and say hey, we’re not going to make our goal (for the solar program) this year.” She added, “When you talk about en- ergy efficiency, it’s more than putting in a water heater, it’s more than putting on solar.” Using PCEF funds to support clean energy, the organization has been able to upgrade homes and move toward greater energy efficiency. “Some people are still working with oil furnaces,” Roberts said. “We know we’ve got to get rid of that. It’s not only polluting the air, polluting yourself, polluting the home, but it’s also expen- sive to maintain. We’ve been able to in- stall energy efficient replacements. We don’t want to say you have to then get electric or solar heat, if you want the comfort of your gas heater. We’ll glad- ly help you, but we’re going to help you install an efficient one.” For more information, visit https:// www.aaah.org.
