July 13, 2022 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3
News
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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
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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.