Meet Jennifer Park, candidate for Portland City Council District 2

Editor’s note: Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5. Stay informed with OPB on the presidential race, key congressional battles and other local contests and ballot measures in Oregon and Southwest Washington at opb.org/elections.

Name: Jennifer Park

Age (and when/whether that will change before the election): 42

Pronouns: she/they

Neighborhood: Arbor Lodge

Are you a renter or homeowner? Homeowner

Education: Executive Masters in Public Administration in progress

Occupation: Programs Director, Non-profit

How long you’ve lived in the city of Portland: 10 years (since May 2014)

Portland is facing an historic election involving a new voting system and an unusually high number of candidates. Journalists at The Oregonian/OregonLive and Oregon Public Broadcasting share a goal of ensuring that Portland voters have the information they need to make informed choices, and we also know candidates’ time is valuable and limited.

That’s why the two news organizations teamed up this cycle to solicit Portland City Council candidates’ perspectives on the big issues in this election. Here’s what they had to say:

For each of the following questions, please limit your answer to no more than 150 words.

Name two existing city policies or budget items you’d make it a priority to change. Why did you select those and how do you plan to line up at least 7 votes on the council to make them happen? Please avoid broad, sweeping statements and instead provide details.

Our public safety service area budget has to be addressed. The fact that we do not resource public safety comprehensively, but rather in isolated silos, is inefficient and ineffective. We need to clean-up our inclusionary housing policy to effectively reinvest opt-out fees, hold developers accountable to leasing affordable units in a timely manner and to appropriate renters, and incentivize going above our minimums, not exclusively meeting our minimums.

Finding coalitions of councilors who intend to champion initiatives not only in, but across district, and then working collaboratively to bring along enough colleagues to pass an initiative, will be a critical role that I am experienced in driving.

What previous accomplishments show that you are the best pick in your district? Please be specific.

Spending six years working in non-profit supportive housing, partnering with the Department of Public Health, and working in privately owned properties, I know how to drive successful services in collaborative networks. I know how to partner internally – collaborating with a Leadership Team with unique goals, and adapting projects to meet all needs.

Innovating new systems to improve service delivery.

A specific example is when I transitioned from Operations Manager to General Manager of a 94-unit supportive housing hotel. We had a huge backlog of maintenance work orders that hadn’t been addressed and there was no way our staffing model would be able to overcome them. I created new technical infrastructure to track and manage the work, its aging, and its urgency. I collaborated with my Leadership team, including the managers of other supportive housing hotels, to restructure how we deploy our maintenance teams.

This comprehensive leadership, collaboration and innovation

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Portland is on track to permit the fewest number of multifamily units in 15 years and remains thousands of units below what’s needed to meet demand. What steps would you take to dramatically and quickly increase the availability of housing?

I would like us to invest in new housing innovations that our city hasn’t directly invested in before:

We should find channels, via grants and permitting, to incentivize commercial conversions, especially in our downtown core where our commercial vacancy rates are 30-35%. I’ve completed a commercial conversion policy study and commercial conversions have huge revitalization impacts on communities. The biggest issue with commercial conversions is seismic upgrades. The speed that we can turnover units with via redevelopment, the expansive climate benefits, and the emergency risk management, all provide us with incentives to make the additional investments that come with commercial conversions.

I would also like us to prioritize the exploration and investment in new housing technologies, such as the bio-based and recyclable 3D printed homes coming out of the University of Maine that reduce the burden of supply chain issues and promote affordability.

The next City Council is going to have to make some very difficult decisions regarding what to fund and how. What essential services must the city provide and how should the city sustainably fund them?

We must prioritize Portland Street Response operating at a 24/7 service level, with a path for service expansion. One of the funding streams that will support this is the MedicAid billing that can begin only once the program is operating fulltime. The fact that we haven’t followed through on our commitment, opening the door to federal funding to support our public safety service area, is unacceptable.

One thing about the new charter I am particularly excited about is that we can look at our budget comprehensively. This means we can look at our public safety service area budget as a whole, ask ourselves, for example, why are we investing so much in police overtime, and determine a path forward for significantly reducing that expenditure – creating a local community policing hiring model that increases our force from and by our community; reinvesting in underfunded alternative forms of public safety, like

Portlanders have approved many tax measures in the past decade – supporting affordable housing, free preschool programs and green energy initiatives. Are there specific taxes or levies you want eliminated or would choose not to renew? Are there specific taxes or levies you would support creating? Why?

There are not any current initiatives I would sign on to eliminating or proposing at this time. An $8.2 billion budget is a large budget for the size of our city, and we are not doing enough with it.

We have too many inefficiencies. We need to clean up our operations and accountability before we make any sweeping changes. For example, we have brought in $5 million in developer fees for opting out of inclusionary housing in new development, and we haven’t reinvested that money in new affordable housing. We are likely going to need to make structural changes to the new council structure (e.g. staffing levels that actually align with GTAC recommendations) that will impact the budget. We cannot make large scale changes to our revenue model until we have a handle on why we are spending so much money without the community feeling like they are

Do you have any concerns with the changes coming to city elections and city governance? If so, what would you like to see change?

My concern is if we elect a council that does not have the vision or experience to craft effective policy. As a legislative branch we can only ensure that our policy goals become our outcomes if we write them effectively. We need to say what we want achieved/implemented, any guidelines we expect that to operate within, the accountability metrics, the reporting framework, and how we will implement changes if we need to adapt our vision to achieve the goal. If our new city council simply tells our Mayor and City Administrator that we want more affordable housing, then we put the approach in the hands of only one of the 13 people elected to office by the community we will be representing. My Executive Masters in Public Administration informs my ability to be an effective legislator.

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For the five remaining questions, please answer in 50 words or fewer:

Do you favor arresting and jailing people who camp on public property in Portland who refuse repeated offers of shelter, such as the option to sleep in a city-designated tiny home cluster?

Most often people who are given repeated offers of shelter that meet their needs accept. Time to build trust is a critical step. We need to invest in the technology that allows us to identify, on demand, shelter options that meet an individual’s unique needs. In the camping ordinance there

Would you vote yes on a proposal to fund hundreds more police officers than the City Council has already authorized? Why or why not? How would the city pay for it?

I would not vote on making a huge new investment until we have done our due diligence to understand the need we are trying to address and what is the right direction. For example, simply saying we need more police because we invest so much in overtime is naive. Until

Do you support putting the Clean Energy Fund measure back on the ballot? What, if any changes, would you support?

Absolutely not. The community wanted us to invest in climate resiliency and sustainability with a focus on our BIPOC communities who are most impacted. We’ve brought in a significantly higher amount of money than we expected, without a negative impact. There is so much more we can do with those

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Which would you prioritize: Creation of more protected bike lanes and priority bus lanes or improved surfacing of existing degraded driving lanes?

In this binary I would prioritize protected bike lanes and priority bus lanes. We can still address driving infrastructure through small scale fixes like more aggressive pothole servicing. When we address full resurfacing we should be looking into new innovations, like permeable pavement.

Have the problems impacting downtown Portland received too much or too little attention from current city leaders? Why?

Too much attention with too little action. We are still seeing high vacancy rates and struggling businesses. We need to address the revitalization by enacting innovative policy approaches.