The Oregonian gets a kill...

...and guess who will get the bucks?

The Oregonian got a clean kill—rare in our ailing local media—after dropping the investigative axe on one Linda Woodley, whose cobbled-together nonprofit had just been awarded a $11.5-million contract by the city’s Clean Energy Community Benefits fund.

The contract was issued on Dec.2 to provide 15,000 free portable air conditioners to “protect” low-income people from another once-in-a-blue-moon heat wave like the one that supposedly killed 60 people last summer. How Woodley’s charity would select new, potential victims from the legions of the low-income was hardly disclosed: it’s the thought that counts.

The Oregonian had originally lauded the award as a “sweeping program,” and gave Carmen Rubio, the Commissioner who runs the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, which runs the program, a chance to run her mouth:

“It’s critical that we plan for the increasing impacts of this [climate] change, which falls first and hardest on our vulnerable seniors, houseless communities, low-income and Black and brown households.”

Woodley’s charity, cunningly called “Diversifying Energy” (wink-wink, nod-nod) was a little iffy, if the Oregonian had cared to look: the non-profit would only promise to move 3,000 AC units the first year but would immediately cream off $7-million of that for…well, for Woodley, basically. In the fine print, other non-profits would be charged with actually moving the units into residences. Where, given the vagaries of Portland weather, they would gather dust for probably 10 months per year.

That part of the scam interested the Oregonian not at all: they Googled Woodley and found—the horror!—that she had a prison term and some other misdeeds in her past and that was it. The city yanked the contract.

As noted before, the Oregonian was deeply disinterested in how Ms. Woodley hornswoggled the anonymous committee that made the decision, nor did it even get a fresh quote from Commissioner Rubio. You’d think that an expenditure of $11.5-million of the city’s money would catch her eye, but we’ll never know. The Oregonian knows how to contain the blood-splash.

At the very bottom of today’s self-congratulation story, the Oregonian noted in passing that some outfit called Earth Advantage will now get the dough.

And that was that, although a quick dip into Duck Duck Go would turn up stuff such as:

Earth Advantage is a Portland-based nonprofit organization that supports and educates homeowners, architects and contractors during the building and certification process. They provide guidance, documentation, verification and communication with the United States Green Building Council, also referred to as USGBC, in order to ensure a project completes certification…. Since its start in 2005, Earth Advantage has certified over 17,000 single family homes and 19,000 multi-family units. Its goal is to get every builder in the Northwest building to zero energy-ready standards by 2030.

A visit to their web site indicates that the company is more into certification (for a fee, of course) and general rah-rah for higher building standards (useful advertising for big-time mass market builders and a pain for the small-timers) and green stuff.

Delivering 15,000 air conditioners into the homes of people most likely (by what measure? again, don’t ask) to die in a heatwave? Seems like a bit of a heavy-lift.

The Oregonian isn’t much interested in that. After all, the boilerplate on the Earth Advantage web site immunizes them from deeper scrutiny by our woke press:

At Earth Advantage, we understand that climate change does not affect everyone in the same way. Frontline communities, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), are disproportionately impacted due to systemic racism.

So, home free!

But check out another web page and you might sense a certain, well…problem lurking for this outfit: the two top dudes are, well….dudes! And white! And of the 28 people worthy of a picture on the staff page, 18 are male and (with one possible exception) white as the Mr. Hood snow.

Ms. Woodley, for her part, is prepping up what she calls a “rebuttal.” There’s a race card just waiting to be played.

It might be rather interesting if she plays it.