The next mayor of Portland, Oregon, is a trucking company owner.
Keith Wilson, owner and CEO of Portland-based less-than-truckload carrier Titan Freight Systems, won a nonpartisan election that was decided by ranked-choice voting. Voters rank their choices and the winner is decided in what amounts to a series of knockout calculations.
Wilson’s election was considered something of an upset. He prevailed in a race with, by one count, 19 candidates, including a combination writer/exotic dancer who professionally goes by the name Viva Las Vegas.
Wilson will assume office Jan. 1.
He did manage to snag the endorsement of Portland’s longtime weekly, Willamette Week, which almost 20 years ago did something alternative publications almost never do: win a Pulitzer Prize, helping to cement its role as a major journalistic force in the City of Roses.
In endorsing Wilson, the weekly expressed reservations about the two leading candidates in the race, citing “revelations about the past actions and character” of City Commissioners Carmen Rubio and Rene Gonzalez.
Current Mayor Ted Wheeler did not seek reelection.
Big focus on homelessness
Wilson ran on a platform primarily focused on Portland’s enormous homeless problem. His plan would involve new shelter construction. As Oregon Public Broadcasting said of his proposal, “He’s visited cities across the country to learn different approaches to addressing [homelessness] and built a nonprofit in 2023 focused on growing Portland’s shelter capacity.”
That led Willamette Week, in granting its endorsement, to say of Wilson, “His enthusiasm for solving the problem is unflagging; perhaps that’s something we shouldn’t scoff at, but instead ask for more of from our elected officials.”
43-vehicle fleet
Titan’s LTL fleet has 43 vehicles, according to information provided by the Wilson campaign to FreightWaves by email. A third of its power units are box trucks; the remaining two-thirds are Class 8 tractors. It describes itself as a general freight LTL.
It employs 61 workers. All its drivers are company employees, operating out of seven warehouses in Oregon and Washington.
Wilson owns 100% of Titan. His father earlier consolidated several companies into what is now Titan.
Lots of green trucks
While Willamette Week declared Titan “100% fossil fuel free,” the reality is somewhat more complex. The Wilson campaign said Titan has three electric Freightliner eCascadia tractors and three electric Freightliner eM2 box trucks that operate out of Titan’s Portland terminal.
It also has 32 trucks that run on renewable diesel. There is a west coast-based clean fuels alliance among California, with its giant Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program, Oregon with its own LCFS, Washington with its Clean Fuel Standard and Canadian province British Columbia with its LCFS. The end result is that the economic incentives of the LCFS drive investment into the production of renewable diesel, made primarily from such feedstocks as animal fats and vegetable oils.
According to the campaign, that sum total means that 88% of the Titan fleet is “fossil-fuel free.” But it added that the trucks operating in Portland itself are fossil fuel-free. (Renewable diesel and petroleum diesel are fully interchangeable, so a truck that finds renewable diesel unobtainable in the short term can also run on petroleum diesel.)
Wilson will be entering into a role with altered powers compared to Wheeler, according to media reports about the election. As Oregon Public Broadcasting described a new system approved by voters, “the mayor will no longer sit on City Council and will instead focus on running city departments alongside a new city administrator.”
But it is a full-time job and Wilson will be stepping away from his duties running Titan, according to the campaign. “Keith is in talks with city attorneys as we speak to either sell the company or put it in a blind trust,” a campaign spokesman said.
Wilson’s focus on homelessness was seen as ambitious by supporters and unworkable by critics. Portland’s longtime newspaper, the Oregonian, declined to endorse Wilson. But it described Titan’s owner as “affable” and noted he had founded a nonprofit aimed at the homeless, Shelter Portland.
“Even his top priority – opening a network of night-time homeless shelters at churches and other community groups – seems to gloss over the complexity of problems facing people who are homeless,” the Oregonian wrote.
Wilson’s campaign, in its email to FreightWaves, said the core of his homeless plan would “rapidly set up a network of nighttime and day shelter to immediately end unsheltered homelessness and address the suffering on our streets.”
By doing so, the campaign said, “we can enforce our community safety laws” and “provide relief to our neighborhoods and small businesses.”
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