CUB Remembers Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish
Posted on February 26, 2020 by Janice Thompson
Tags, Water/Wastewater, General Interest
A recent memorial service highlighted Portland Commissioner Nick Fish’s extensive record of public service. Fish died in early January of stomach cancer and served 11 years on the Portland City Council.
“It was not words that defined Nick Fish, you could sense his compassion and empathy in a single handshake,” said former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts. Earlier news coverage included this comment on affordable housing, a particular passion of Commissioner Fish, from former Street Roots executive director Israel Bayer: “Both the Portland housing bond and the Metro housing bond serve as examples of the vision Nick had for building a ‘big tent’ housing coalition to give people a safe place to call home.”
CUB saw Commissioner Fish’s dedication firsthand, in our role providing independent oversight of Portland’s two public utility bureaus, the Portland Water Bureau (PWB) and Bureau of Environmental Services (BES). Commissioner Fish became commissioner-in-charge for both these bureaus in early 2014 and developed an agreement with CUB that ensured we’d have all required information for our oversight of City Council public utility decisions. The City does not pay CUB, but includes CUB membership information in bills for water and wastewater services.
In May 2014, a Portland ballot measure to remove Council control of the two public utility bureaus failed with a 73 percent “no” vote. Though Commissioner Fish had opposed the ballot measure, he wisely did not interpret its failure as a signal that the Council didn’t need CUB’s independent oversight, and continued to welcome CUB’s role in monitoring the Council’s water and wastewater management decisions.
CUB’s first victory in this program was reducing a sewer rate increase by ending a subsidy to private developers that inappropriately reduced their sewer system development fees. Commissioner Fish supported CUB’s recommendation and secured Council support. CUB then worked with Commissioner Fish to end another developer subsidy by ensuring that developers pay fees that fully covered the costs of ensuring that their plans comply with environmental standards. Ending these two developer subsidies has provided ongoing savings for residential customers that now total $13.7 million.
Public health regulations and seismic resilience are major drivers of capitol improvement projects that are frequently quite expensive. CUB pushes for cost containment measures - for example, we have been monitoring BES spending to ensure that the mandated secondary treatment construction effort at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant doesn’t become the rationale for additional projects which could be delayed to ease rate impacts. CUB has also urged the strategic delay of PWB capital improvement projects to ease the rate impacts of water filtration improvements mandated by the federal government.
CUB worked closely with Commissioner Fish on two strategies to address the impact of higher public utility rates. One was allowing quarterly bills, which reduces the City’s administrative costs, to be paid on a monthly basis by customers. Obviously this does not lower rates, but it does facilitate regular monthly household budgeting. The second strategy was updating and expanding the City’s assistance to low-income public utility customers. Commissioner Fish particularly focused on addressing a national problem – how to provide rate relief to low-income renters who don’t directly get public utility bills. The result was an innovative partnership between Portland’s public utilities and Home Forward to assist low income renters in danger of eviction. In general, Commissioner Fish’s commitment to assisting customers, particularly our low-income neighbors, demonstrated his compassion.
CUB continues to work with Portland’s public utilities and their new commissioners-in-charge. But we would be remiss if we didn’t take a moment, so to speak, on the CUB Blog to commemorate Commissioner Fish’s dedicated public service, and the work he did to facilitate the launch of CUB’s Portland Water and Wastewater program.
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02/25/20 | 0 Comments | CUB Remembers Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish