Meet Jonathan Tasini, candidate for Portland City Council District 2

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Name: Jonathan Tasini

Neighborhood: Eliot

Renter/homeowner: Renter

Education: B.A., Political Science.

Occupation: Founder/Executive Director, Just Transition for All/Organizational and Communications Strategist

How long have you lived in the city of Portland: 6 years

Age: 67 (68 in October)

Pronouns: He/Him

For each of the following questions, please limit your answer to no more than 150 words. If you run over, we will at our discretion cut your response to meet that limit.

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.

I would seek to bolster both the Portland Street Response (to increase its efforts to 24/7) and the Neighborhood Emergency Team program within the Bureau of Emergency Management. Lining up 7 votes for each program, to some extent, depends on who is elected. That said, I would simply make the following case for each one:

• Portland Street Response has proven to be very effective. It should be valued by both those potential Council members who support increased policing (because PSR responds to calls to assist people in crisis, rather than have police officers expend their time) and to those potential Council members who seek to build a public safety vision that emphasizes deconfliction.

• The NET program is one of the city’s great largest “bang for the buck” programs, and a stellar example of volunteerism. I believe each Council member would see the value of active NET nodes

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

I was president of UAW Local 1981 for 13 years. In that capacity, I was responsible for the whole range of internal operations (including finances, budgets, strategy), legislative lobbying (local, state and federal), political efforts (as part of the UAW political action framework, primarily), and oversaw our various organizing campaigns that required broad coalition building; I also won a U.S. Supreme Court case that took on an emerging threat to all creative workers and set a new standard for rights for all freelance artists (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2000/00-201 ), which mainly underscores my ability to identify challenges and opportunities ahead of the curve. During my tenure the union tripled in size and budget, and we balanced out budget every year. I ran Labor Research Association, a pro-labor research outfit based on New York. So, I am well-grounded in key worker-focused economic issues (for example, wages, pensions, labor

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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 focus very specifically on two areas. First, we need to change our zoning laws to encourage far more density. Portland’s housing culture emphasizing single-family homes is understandable and long-standing. But, that was appropriate for a city with a population 30 percent smaller than today. There are plenty of corridors, including in District 2, that could accommodate taller residential structures. My general view of regulations is that no large organization is perfect nor immune from the need to revisit long-held standards. On July 1st of 2024, all the bureaus with a role in permitting were consolidated into one bureau (Portland Permitting and Development). They should be supported and allowed to adapt to this new system with strong oversight by the City Council. After a year, should changes be implemented, there should be a review to understand how the changes have impacted staff and customers and whether the permitting timelines

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?

The definition of “essential services” is clearly in the eye of the beholder. 62 percent of the 2024-25 budget is allocated for Public Safety and Parks and Recreations; everyone would agree that those two areas are essential services. Beyond that, the rest of the budget touches on essential services (e.g., transportation, housing). If one can define business license tax cuts as a “service”, I will recommend that we take a hard look at the entire suite of business tax cuts to evaluate whether that expenditure (in terms of foregone revenue) makes sense (in particular, the hastily agreed-to Downtown Business Incentive” program)—how do city taxpayers truly benefit from such tax cuts?

Funding: The current City Council has utterly failed to reap a larger share of federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) legislation and Inflation Reduction Act; one-time ARPA funds will expire in FY 2024- 25.

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 to not renew? Are there specific taxes or levies you would support creating? Why?

Taxes to support affordable housing, free preschool programs and green energy initiatives are all dues we pay to live in a decent society. Too often, political leaders, responding to political not policy concerns, overemphasize the burden of taxes. Our problem in the city, and state, is no different than the challenge faced by cities and states nationwide: the wealthy do not pay their fair share into the overall common good, leaving average taxpayers/working class people to shoulder a disproportionate share. I will spend my entire term in office, if elected, trying to change that equation.

As an overall proposition, we need to think beyond the city’s “four corners” about revenue, specifically around taxation. I am advocating a significant change in the “kicker” to create a working-class “kicker” (https://www.jonathantasini.com/issues/a-kicker-for-workers-not-the-wealthy). Such a reform would put money in the pockets of those Portlanders who truly need the

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

The campaign finance system, theoretically structured to draw in a more diverse coterie of candidates, is a fantasy drawn up by people who have either never run for office and/or have never run a professional campaign. The small donor office is near collapse because of underfunding, and by cutting matching fund tiers mid-campaign, the current City Council blew large holes in the budgets for every candidate, most of whom put their lives on hold to run for an office based on a very different set of budgetary projections promised last year. Even more corrosive, the system in place gives more power to wealthy donors, not the opposite. It prevents candidates from hiring experienced campaign professionals because of the shriveled budgets; running campaigns is not for amateurs. Until Citizens United is overturned, virtually all campaign finance limits favor very wealthy donors who can stand up independent expenditure efforts.

Should I

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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 whorefuse repeated offers of shelter, such as the option to sleep in a city-designated tiny home cluster?

I do not. Respectfully, the question is very vaguely worded (what rises to the level of “repeated offers”?). But, in general, I do not support the incarceration of people who are without shelter because the lack of shelter is a social ill, not a crime.

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?

Respectfully, we first need a thorough discussion about the scope of public safety, and what it means and should look like in our city, before we decide to fund hundreds more police, or for that matter, cutting policing. Simply throwing out a number of “hundreds” in a vacuum is not

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

I fully support PCEF as it currently is structured, both in its financing and authority.

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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?

This should not be an either-or proposition. I would reframe the challenge this way: because of the decline in transportation-related revenues (for example, the rise in the number of electric vehicles which, in turn, reduces gas tax revenue to the state), in order to fully fund our transportation needs, we

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

The problem is the quality of the debate, not quantity. We have a chance to reimagine downtown, and create a model public “square”. The debate needs to meld in the new thinking about remote work, the organization of work (I’m proposing a four-day work week for public workers, for the