On a muggy July day, volunteers marched the half mile from Eugene, Oregon’s Sierra Club office to City Hall, chanting, “Climate change is here to stay, and billionaires have got to pay!”
The five bankers’ boxes worth of signatures they carried — some 14,000 — aimed to put the Eugene Clean Energy Fund on the November ballot. If passed, the measure could provide millions of dollars in funding for climate-resilience projects.
Large corporate retailers would pay the city a 2% tax via a mandatory retail license. (Oregon lacks a statewide retail sales tax.) The tax would affect companies that reap more than $1 billion in gross profit nationally and $500,000 locally — big-box stores like Walmart and Target, e-commerce giants like Amazon and banks like Chase and Wells Fargo.
Most voters thought the idea was a no-brainer, said one volunteer signature-collector.
“In a country that has seen its first trillionaire, it is far past time to make ultra-wealthy corporations pay their fair share, so that our communities can become more livable and resilient,” Aya Cockram, the campaign’s co-leader and an organizer with Breach Collective, told the crowd outside City Hall.
THE EUGENE CLEAN Energy Fund is modeled after a similar measure in Portland that passed in 2018. Portland’s 1% tax on large retailers has raised more than $1 billion to retrofit homes, plant trees and develop community solar, among other projects. The city estimates that the latest slate of projects, approved in 2025, will cut some 76,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality, lower energy bills and enhance green spaces.
Advocates hope the funding will enable Eugene to meet its 2016 goal of cutting the community’s emissions by 7.6% annually. The most recent data shows only a 10% total drop from 2014 to 2021, according to city spokesperson Marion Suitor.
The city’s sustainability office planned to hire a third full-time staffer in 2026, but the position was eliminated in budget cuts. With rising inflation and the loss of state and federal funding, the city’s financial analyst said Eugene needs to cut $5 million a year from its budget to avoid a financial crisis.
“Any of these (climate) programs that we’re talking about, you can assume are not funded, or underfunded to the extreme right now,” said Dylan Plummer, a campaign adviser with the Oregon Sierra Club.
AS PROPOSED, 10% of the measure’s funds would go to green infrastructure and up to 30% to clean energy-related job training and apprenticeships. Several local labor unions have endorsed the measure.
Joel Iboa, executive director of the Oregon Just Transition Alliance, which co-led the campaign, cited an Amazon distribution center that just received city approval. The facility’s delivery trucks will likely increase carbon emissions in the city, and while Amazon says it’s committed to hiring locals, most of its revenue won’t recirculate locally. “This is money that real people have helped make, and what we are doing is getting a small portion of that back and reinvesting it in the communities that have made that wealth possible,” Iboa said.
The largest portion of the fund’s revenue, up to 60%, would go to renewable energy and efficiency programs, and half of that must benefit under-resourced communities. Emily Matlock, communications director for the local environmental justice organization Beyond Toxics, said that the fund could expand the group’s work on Eugene’s west side, where industrial pollution and low-income housing are concentrated.
In West Eugene, diesel fumes and industrial pollution waft over the neighborhood. Since houses here are generally older and poorly insulated, indoor air quality becomes unhealthy. These homes also require more energy to heat and cool, especially in climate extremes. The fund could help Beyond Toxics provide air purifiers and air conditioners to more residents who can’t afford them.
In Trainsong, a neighborhood surrounded by railroad tracks and industry, the soil beneath the park contains toxic chemicals. Matlock said planned remediation efforts could inadvertently send toxins blowing into homes. The fund could help homeowners replace old insulation and windows and install energy-efficient heat pumps that filter air as they heat or cool it, thereby preventing a decades-long legacy of pollution from becoming further entrenched.
Advocates say the fund could also pay for pilot projects like a resilience hub offering residents respite and resources during extreme weather, or even small-scale solar power generation.
Five percent of the fund would be reserved for future innovation. “The sky is really the limit, and there is an opportunity for us to be on the cutting edge of the transition to green energy, and ensuring that it’s done in a way that supports our front-line communities,” Plummer said.
“Ballot measures like this are a love letter to the community — folks saying, ‘ If no one else will do this for us, we’re going to do it for us.’”
EUGENE’S CAMPAIGN IS modeled after Portland’s, but organizers are wary of recent challenges there. Portland’s tax was estimated to bring in from $30 million to $60 million a year. Instead, it brought in closer to $200 million a year — more than $1 billion cumulatively. Eventually, some began clamoring for what they saw as free money.
In August, a contentious ballot initiative designed to reroute 25% of Portland’s Clean Energy Fund to the police department narrowly failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for November. The measure, backed by the Portland Police Association, would have given millions of dollars to the department, no strings attached. The campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with climate change, and they’re not even pretending it does,” said Cherice Bock, climate policy director at 350 PDX, which helped pass the Portland fund.
Meanwhile, Tom Dundon, the new, Dallas-based billionaire owner of the Portland Trailblazers, the city’s NBA team, has suggested he’ll keep the franchise in town if the city pays to renovate its arena. Mayor Keith Wilson appears willing to use clean energy fund dollars for the project. “We’ll renovate green, cut carbon, and do it the Portland way,” he said in a July press release. In mid-August, the City Council committed $120 million for the arena, from “sources yet to be confirmed.”
Since the Moda Center is already LEED-certified, Bock sees no climate benefit from city-funded renovations.
She added that the perception that there is a surplus of clean energy funds to pass around simply isn’t true. Yes, the fund is worth $1 billion, but a 2023 analysis by the city of Portland found that fully funding all the projects in the city’s climate plan would cost $50 billion.
EUGENE’S CLEAN ENERGY Fund officially qualified for the ballot on Aug. 5. By then, heat waves had given way to the state’s worst wildfire season on record. Smoke and smog filled the skies as residents experienced their second day of dangerous levels of particulate matter and ozone, with a local air quality index of 187.
More than 2 million acres of Oregon burned in fires exacerbated by extreme climate-driven drought and federal funding cuts to everything from Forest Service budgets to emergency firefighting assistance.
In light of this, the ballot initiative has provided a rare bright spot, Iboa said. “Ballot measures like this are a love letter to the community — folks saying, ‘If no one else will do this for us, we’re going to do it for us.’”
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This article appeared in the November 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Funding a greener Eugene.”
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