In 2022, Portland residents voted to drastically change the city’s form of government. That includes using ranked-choice voting to expand the city council from five seats to 12. Another change is the creation of four geographic districts, with voters in each district electing three candidates to represent them on the new council.
District 1 is in the far east side of Portland, including neighborhoods such as Hazelwood, Mill Park, Centennial and Parkrose to name a few. On Sept. 30, “Think Out Loud” convened a District 1 candidates forum at Von Ebert Brewing. Candidates were invited to participate based on the number of individual donors that contributed to their campaign. They include: Candace Avalos, Doug Clove, Jamie Dunphy, Timur Ender, Noah Ernst, Terrence Hayes, David Linn, Steph Routh, Thomas Shervey, Loretta Smith and Cayle Tern.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Two years ago, Portlanders voted to completely overhaul the city’s form of government. One of the biggest changes is to the city council which will expand from five seats to 12. Instead of being elected at large, meaning citywide, they’ll be from four new geographic districts. Each of those districts will send three people to the city council.
It’s a lot to keep track of and some districts now have more than 20 candidates. So we’re holding a series of audience events all this month to give Portland voters a chance to meet many of those candidates. We’re gonna bring you radio versions of those events as well. We start today with District 1, which is East Portland. We held the event at Von Ebert Brewing with 11 candidates. They were invited based on the number of individual donors who contributed to their campaigns.
Doug Clove was first up. He’s a water inspector for the Portland Water Bureau. I started by asking him what he sees specifically as the biggest issue in his district.
Doug Clove: Specifically, it’s homelessness and the crime that comes with homelessness. For me, it’s as simple as we have families and we have children that are growing up in this city and they’re feeling like hostages in their own neighborhoods. And so this is something that we have to correct. I think we need to have more police. The Grants Pass decision on homelessness was a plus for us. It gives us more tools, and so I think we need to use those tools, build more shelters and get people off the street. Portland’s a forgiving town and I wouldn’t even have an issue – and I’m not inviting you all to camp in front of my house – but I don’t have an issue with people camping. If you’re homeless and you need to camp … but it’s the garbage, and it’s the unsanitary conditions, and it’s the crime, the small crime that accompanies all that.
So I would bring in more police. I do think we need to add Portland Street Response. I think the last resort should be the criminal justice system and bringing people into it. But we need to get whatever groups we can to get out there, to help these people off the street, help them recover from drug addiction and so forth. And when they commit crimes, we need the police to arrest them and take them off the streets. So that’s exactly what I would handle, because it’s not fair to the taxpayers of East Portland to be paying taxes when they can’t have their children walk out on our sidewalks without coming across fentanyl, or needles, or just troubling characters.
Miller: My next question was gonna be, what would you do as one vote among 12 on the city council about this, but if it seems like you’ve touched on that. So if you want, you can say more about that or else I can ask you another question.
Clove: No, go ahead. Ask me another question.
Miller: OK. What do you want to see from Portland Street Response, which has shown promise in its few years, but has had a relatively slow roll out citywide?
Clove: I just wanna see it increased. In any other kind of services, whether it be nonprofit … just Portland Street Response, being with the city, I think that it needs to be increased. We need to offer these people help. But if they don’t want help, they’re not gonna ruin our neighborhoods and they’re not gonna make it unsafe for our children to walk on the sidewalks. So I definitely think Portland Street Response is the first contact that should be out there making with these homeless people in these camps. But after that, it’s up to the police to remove and the city to remove these camps, clean them up, and allow people to live safely in their neighborhoods.
Miller: The next question from the bowl. This question came from a listener online. What do you think of Portland’s bicycle transportation infrastructure?
Clove: I think there’s plenty of it and I think because of the way the council has been organized before, with five councilors that are all just asking for votes of the entire city, what you’re getting is these interest groups such as the bike people, I would say, that have just really increased bike lanes around the inner city. Now, the inner city is dense. East Portland is not dense. East Portland, you need to drive places and the fact that bike lanes and so forth are being pushed on East Portland, when you have to … If you live in the inner city, in the lower area, you can go buy a $5,000 bike, put on your gear and ride anywhere you wanna go. People don’t have that money. They don’t have those resources out in East Portland. They use cars, they drive. And not to mention, how safe is it to be on a bike? So I think that it’s time that East Portland does East Portland.
Miller: Doug Clove, thanks very much.
Clove: Thank you.
Miller: That is Doug Clove, a water inspector for the Portland Water Bureau.
Our next candidate is Loretta Smith, a small business owner and former Multnomah County commissioner. Loretta Smith, welcome.
Loretta Smith: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue facing this district?
Smith: I think there are several. There are economic issues, there are public safety issues. There is access to information issues. There’s the unsanctioned homeless camps and RVs, which I live with every day because I live off of Sandy Boulevard. And there is this massive group of folks who come with RVs. They leave, they come back, they know the system to be tagged. And I have this vision that we could clean up the RVs and the unsanctioned camping with the right kind of policies, putting the right kind of resources in. For the first time, we’re gonna have East Portland represented by folks, three folks who really care about the community who have lived in this community.
I own a duplex in the Wilkes neighborhood. My son, his wife and my grandkids live on one side and I live on the other. My grandkids, 6 and 10, they go to Margaret Scott Elementary School and sometimes they’re afraid to walk to the bus stop – it’s just a block away. It’s at Wilkes Park and they’re afraid to go because they see people who have been camping, they’re talking to them, they feel afraid. So we take turns going to the bus stop in the morning so that the kids won’t be afraid. And I just have this vision that we can do better than what we’re doing. When you leave $1.25 million on the table from Multnomah County that was unused from the Metro bond, we could have housed all the 5,300 unhoused homeless folks with that $1.25 million. And we wouldn’t have those crimes that are associated with the RV and the camping.
We need to also, as we’re talking about addiction services and mental health services, the one thing that I’m gonna work on is working on the workforce because we’re not talking about workforce. I looked at a study from University of Chicago and they show that 53% of the people who are in shelters – and this was in ‘21 – were employed prior to being homeless and 43% of the people who are unhoused on the street were employed prior to that. So we also need to put some of the resources into workforce. And I think it’s a mistake for us to always assume that someone has a mental health problem. It’s an affordability problem. Portland has become so unaffordable for families and people to live, especially in East Portland.
Miller: What would you do about that, about the affordability problem, as one vote among 12?
Smith: As one vote among 12, I would be voting to put in workforce training and education for apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeship program. We have so many infrastructure projects that are in the pipeline right now, from the Sellwood Bridge to the other stimulus package projects that bridge all around the state. We need 22,000 skilled workers to get that interstate bridge up and running. We don’t have enough time and space for the trades to be able to add additional cohorts, but we can expand those cohorts so that we can train enough people and not bring in people from outside of our state to get these good working class, good paying middle class jobs. And so that’s what I’m gonna be fighting for.
Miller: Loretta Smith, thanks very much.
Smith: Thank you.
Miller: That is Loretta Smith, former Multnomah County commissioner and a small business owner.
Our next candidate to come up here is Thomas Shervey, an office assistant in the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice. Thomas, what do you see as the biggest issue facing this district in particular?
Thomas Shervey: Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here. I think the biggest opportunity that this district faces is public engagement. As a lot of people already know and are going to bring up, the East side, District 1, has long been underrepresented and ignored by our local government. And so a lot of people out here have become disenfranchised. They’ve lost faith in the local government and what it’s doing. So Portland could be doing all sorts of good things and they wouldn’t believe it. They can’t see it because they have been ignored.
On day one of the new city council, we will have three candidates that live within the confines of East Portland. That’s more than we’ve had historically put together. So the biggest problem is figuring out how to reach the average citizen and let them know about the services that we provide, and then we also learn from them what services they need.
Miller: You’re describing, in a sense, an issue of communication.
Shervey: Yes.
Miller: So what would you do as one vote among 12, or maybe your argument is one of three votes among 12, to address this?
Shervey: So I would want the city councilors of District 1, whomever they may be, to be required to attend neighborhood association meetings – all of them. Now, I know that the scheduling, some of them take place on the same day, but at least one, if not all of them, should have to be there because the people in the neighborhood association know what’s going on in the neighborhood. And so they need to have access to their representative to the city.
Furthermore, I think we should be able to, if not once a month, at least once a quarter have an open … not an open house, what’s the word I’m looking for? A town hall, where we have an established venue. We have an established time every month or every quarter, depending on, that we let people know what’s going on in the city. And we can also then take more feedback – what’s going on, what’s happening, what do you need? We need to take the government to the people. We can’t wait for them to come to us because they won’t, because they have been ignored for so long. They don’t think we’re working for them and we need to fix that.
Miller: Here’s a question from one of the members of our audience here. How do you see recruitment for TIFCLC is going? They all helpfully wrote this down. TIFCLC stands for Tax Increment Financing Community Leadership Committee – the folks who offer some oversight over how urban renewal dollars are going to be spent. Did I get that right? OK, I got a thumbs up.
Shervey: OK. That was a lot of information at once. So, what was the core of that question?
Miller: I think the core is, how do you get people in this community, in this district of East Portland, to take part in the oversight of taxing and find out of the way urban renewal dollars are going to be spent?
Shervey: OK. So that just kind of feeds into what I was talking about before. We need to bring the government to the people. There’s a lot of people here that are already working in those groups, that are working with nonprofits and they have the expertise, we need to reach out to them. But we also need to be knocking on doors after the election, just so people know that we’re interested, we want to hear their problems and we want to recruit them to us. It has to be an active, constant, putting out the feelers, so we know what’s gonna happen and where it’s gonna happen, [and] how we can fix it.
Miller: Thomas Shervey, thanks very much.
Shervey: Thank you.
Miller: Thomas Shervey is an office assistant in the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice.
Our next candidate is Terrence Hayes. Terrence, come on up, please. Terrence Hayes owns a small business that removes trash and graffiti and is a member of Oregon’s Criminal Justice Commission. Terrence, welcome to the show.
Terrence Hayes: Thank you.
Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue facing your district, District 1?
Hayes: Public safety. People don’t get response from police officers when they call.
Miller: What would you do?
Hayes: Yeah, I was wondering if you were gonna get to the next question. I’m trying to get some more questions. Don’t stop now.
Miller: I see what you are doing. OK, go on. What would you do?
Hayes: I think we need to do a few things. We need to work on a culture in policing. Our community is skeptical in many ways, so we need to find a way to create policies that’s welcoming to women and minorities. And I think that’s gonna be about protecting folks when they get into policing, that make them stay. That’s the only way we’re gonna get more people. We need to create initiatives to hire within our city. I think that’s gonna be the best bet to get the type of police in there that we are all looking for. So I think it’s gonna be about investment, and culture, and creating policies that make people feel protected when they’re in these spaces.
Miller: How many more police officers do you want?
Hayes: Probably about 300.
Miller: Let’s take some questions from the bowl. What do you see as the future of the Office of City and Community Life?
Hayes: My honest thought is that we don’t see the same investment in neighborhood associations that we used to. And so we need to step it up. We need to make communities feel welcome again. We need to make sure we’re putting resources and power behind communities. I think Thomas was talking about it, I think the government needs to step up its game in interacting with community members.
Miller: How would you balance making improvements in this district without gentrifying it?
Hayes: This district ain’t gonna be gentrified for a while. I don’t think that’s complicated, right? Gentrification happens through a long process and that’s generally coming into communities, finding ways to kick Black people and poor people out, and then bringing in people who can afford to live in these homes once the prices go out. I don’t think it’s complicated. You make streets better, you bring community together, you invest in this community. Making this community better doesn’t automatically cause gentrification, right? We just need to invest in East Portland, but I just think those are two totally separate things, right? We can invest in a community without kicking poor people out for sure.
Miller: What endorsement are you most proud of and why?
Hayes: I think it’s gotta be the PPA endorsement, Police Association. I’m a formerly incarcerated person. I lost a cousin to police violence. When I went to my interview for the PPA, I was really clear about the fact of the way that that loss impacted me and my expectation from officers to do better in our communities. It’s really interesting when people talk about that endorsement, they usually talk about it from a lens of expectations of who I’m supposed to be as a Black person and less about how I can impact those spaces positively for Black and Brown communities. So I’m really grateful to be at a table with an entity that has been free to impact our communities and have expectations, and then fight with them to make sure they’re engaging us in the best ways.
Miller: What do you mean when you say that it’s interesting to see the expectations people have about you – what do you mean in particular?
Hayes: I think as Black man, especially formerly incarcerated, I’m supposed to be anti-police. I think the narrative in our community, especially when people have been speaking for Black folks for the last four to five years, is that we’re supposed to be anti-police. We wanted to better define expectations from officers when they engage our communities. Certain people push the defund movement. But when I was in the Black community, we wanted clarity and we wanted the expectation that we end up bringing a new form of gang violence reduction team.
Anyway, nothing actually changed. People scream, people yell, we defunded, we lost Black lives and then we end up creating a team once violent gun violence went up anyway. We could have asked tougher questions, and got clarity and expectation from officers. We’re right back where we started, except we’ve actually clearly defined our expectation of those officers that engage young Black men.
Miller: Terrence, thanks very much.
Hayes: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Terrence Hayes. Terrence Hayes owns a small business that removes trash and graffiti. He is a member of Oregon’s Criminal Justice Commission.
Our next candidate is Steph Routh, former executive director of the nonprofit Oregon Walks, an adjunct instructor at PSU. Steph, welcome.
Steph Routh: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue facing District 1?
Routh: Well, I think the ones that we hear most often and feel are community safety; homelessness and housing; transparent, accountable and responsive government; and shared prosperity. I think the one that I would love to focus on is housing and homelessness.
Miller: How would you focus on it as one vote among 12?
Routh: Well, I have a list. So one, I think at base, keeping people in their homes is really important. So working with county and metro partners for programs like rent stabilization, to make sure … the number one reason people lose their homes is failure to pay rent. So how can we help people through a difficult time? We need a diversity of shelter options. Our unhoused population is also our most diverse population in terms of age, race, everything except class. And so how can we build that diversity of shelter options? And I think we need to really focus on that.
Also, third, create … in this I have the honor of serving on the Planning Commission for the last five years, so I think my unique value proposition among my colleague candidates – we are not opponents, we are colleague candidates – is to create the conditions to build more housing at different prices. So, streamlining permitting. I’m excited about the idea of an office conversion pilot project, purchasing apartment buildings at discounted prices that are currently for sale.
Miller: What issue do you think does not get enough attention in this race?
Routh: That is a great question. I think we talk around the idea of shared prosperity because, among a lot of issues is that wealth gap. Over the last four years of COVID, people who are doing well are doing very well. We’ve seen a few of them launch themselves into space, and others are doing very poorly and have barely gotten by, and are still in these tattered threads of the lack of a safety net. So I think looking at how are we building prosperity through the trades, through economic opportunity, as we rebuild this beautiful city that we all love?
Miller: This is a question that came from our audience here: “I live in a neighborhood that has seen a huge influx of different types of temporary housing. How much is too much? Has the burden been distributed across PDX? What’s being done to support these neighborhoods that are already challenged?”
Routh: I think that’s a really important question. And one thing that we did, on the Planning Commission four years ago, as part of a project called the Shelter to Housing Continuum Project, was to call for an inventory of under-used lots that are owned by the city. And they have recently done that inventory. I think our next step is to look at where those lots are. What are potential appropriate uses and to ensure that we have equity across the city, because there are a couple of neighborhoods I’ve heard a lot from. For example, the Hazelwood neighborhood in East Portland, does have a high concentration. We want to make sure that neighbors, housed and unhoused, are set up for success.
Miller: Steph Routh, thanks very much.
Routh: Thank you.
Miller: Steph Routh is an adjunct instructor at PSU, former executive director of the nonprofit Oregon Walks.
Our next candidate is Cayle Tern. Cayle Tern is civic engagement manager for APANO. Cayle, welcome. What do you see as the biggest issue facing this district, District 1?
Cayle Tern: I think there are a lot of big issues. But I think the overarching issue is that we don’t have that independence, in a sense … housing is an issue that I think we need to address. Homelessness is an issue I think we need to address. But the services that provide housing are not in the district or not adequate in the district. We need to bring these services here. We need more jobs in this area, so families aren’t having to travel all across town, all over the place to work. We need shopping centers so that people don’t have to go out of the district for these things. In general, I think we need to focus on these things that complement a neighborhood that we wanna live in.
Miller: You’re talking about a lot of things but one thing that’s threaded through a lot of that is economic development. What role would you play in that as a member of the city council?
Tern: As a member of the city council, I think we need to develop and incentivize more businesses into the area. I am supportive of incubator programs that help small business owners. Small business owners create and build their business, business that might bring jobs, might bring some stability. Might bring economic stability to the people of East Portland. In order for us to reduce homelessness, we have to have people have money to pay their rent, have people have money to sustain. So I think economic development is a huge part of it.
Miller: Rachel W. sent us this question online. She wrote, “If we increase the number of police officers in Portland, what other areas of the city budget should we cut?”
Tern: If we increase the number of police officers … I don’t know, there are a lot of programs, we are underfunded in a lot of big areas. We’d have to utilize our audit systems. I think an area of opportunities that we can get is maybe consider looking at programs like PCEF to help us advance our environmental issues. We need to consider resources that would probably go to other areas that’s less productive. We have to make tough decisions to determine and we will be cutting programs in order to fund the police budget. There is a finite amount of money and I’m not gonna be the one that says that everything is … we need to make sure that we are utilizing our funding and our resources where it is most applicable.
Miller: Gary K. asked online: “How will you evaluate the options for the upgrade or replacement of the Keller Auditorium?”
Tern: How would I evaluate tough economic questions? We need to put together a task force to identify what are the main costs associated with it? We need to make sure that it is worth the investments or it’s even an investment that we should be making right now. Again, there are lots of different areas that need … the Police Department, resources to address houselessness, transitional housing to support our homeless families. We really need to sit down and re-evaluate our budget, and hold ourselves accountable for where we are spending our money.
Miller: Cayle Tern, thanks very much. Cayle Tern is civic engagement manager for APANO.
Our next candidate is Jamie Dunphy. Jamie Dunphy is the Oregon government relations director for the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, former senior policy director for the late Portland Commissioner Nick Fish. Jamie, what do you see as the biggest issue facing District 1?
Jamie Dunphy: Yeah, I think a lot of my colleagues have done a really good job of framing this, that the basic livability of East Portland is really the number one concern of everybody that I’m talking to. We have a number of intersecting crises happening on the streets at the same time. Anybody who knows anything about this situation knows that we call it homelessness, but it’s really five or six different things that each require a nuanced, and humane, and informed response, and we have failed to address all of those different things. Homelessness is economics. It’s also mental health, it’s also addiction. It’s also LGBTQ status. It’s also a ton of different things that require us to be able to respond in a coordinated way, to address each of those core issues. The failure of our region to address those core issues, and to have any kind of meaningful movement towards what a common definition of success is, means that the average person in our community is seeing that failure in real time.
And it means that we are seeing bad behavior, we’re seeing scary behavior and we have to acknowledge that parents do not feel safe to send their kids to the park for fear of stepping on a needle. The city of Portland will not fix homelessness by itself. But there are a lot of things that we could do rapidly to make it so that we’re meaningfully and urgently addressing these situations, meaningfully delivering services to the people who are on our streets suffering, sleeping on sidewalks and in deeply inhumane situations. And we can also rapidly clean up public spaces. We can clean up needles and human waste, and we can activate public spaces, and parks, and plazas, and business districts in order to try and proactively create the community that we actually need.
Miller: What else would you do to address the many prongs of this?
Dunphy: Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, we don’t have enough places for people to go right now. It’s not humane to allow our neighbors to sleep on the streets and sidewalks and in parks. It’s not a humane scenario for most people, but our completely disjointed response to homelessness has meant that most people within that system do not trust that that system is designed to serve them. My neighborhood in Parkrose sees that when the city tries to do something around homelessness, what they end up doing is sweeping the camps in Laurelhurst. And those folks end up without their property, without their communities, and they end up in Parkrose, off their best game and exhibiting really bad behavior. And that is not actually solving the problem. It is making it a different part of the community their problem instead.
So what I would want to do first is rapidly expand the alternatives to try and to find places where people can go to sleep. Whether it is shelters or SROs – single room occupancy with shared bathrooms and kitchens – whether it’s reusing office spaces that we have existing in Portland right now, whether it’s using some of the vacant lots that we have. For example, the big lot just south of the Fred Meyer and Gateway. These places need to be intentional spaces that we can send people to say, go take your dog, go take your street family, find whatever that next step is, because we cannot allow our neighbors to also sleep in public spaces.
So, we have an option here in East Portland. We have vacant land. We have underused buildings and we can create those intentional spaces. We’ve just never had a cheerleader who actually cares about and understands this community. Instead, when things happen to East Portland, it’s happening without us. It’s happening by somebody downtown who does not know these neighborhoods, does not live in these streets and does not know the impact that they’re actually gonna see.
Miller: Jamie Dunphy, thank you. That is Jamie Dunphy, former senior policy director for the late Portland Commissioner Nick Fish, Oregon government relations director for the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.
Candace Avalos is next. Candace Avalos is the executive director of Verde. Welcome.
Candace Avalos: Thank you.
Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue facing District 1?
Avalos: I agree with a lot of my colleagues that community safety is the biggest issue. But I think it‘s important to look at community safety as more than just gun violence and crime. East Portland has 28 of 30 high crash corridors. We are lacking in basic infrastructure and those are things that contribute as well to folks’ lack of feeling of safety. And then in addition to that, we have very poor response times.
So I know the next question is, what would I do about it? I think it’s important that we are ensuring that we are building a modern first responder system that can deliver the right responder at the right time for East Portlanders. And we need to assess what are the ways that we can prevent crime through environmental design. We need to make sure that we’re creating positive spaces for people to gather. We need to ensure that the streets are lit. We need to ensure that we have actual sidewalks and paved streets. These are all the things that contribute to people’s lack of feeling of safety, and that infrastructure is at the core of how we improve that.
Miller: Former President Donald Trump said recently that he would surge federal law enforcement into every sanctuary city if he were reelected. How would you want Portland to respond?
Avalos: Wow, that was a question designed just for me as the former chair of the Citizen Review Committee who, during 2020, obviously the spotlight was on us as we were seeing the response of Donald Trump sending in troops and just the impact that had on our city. I think what we learned from that is we need to ensure that we have strong systems of accountability here in our city. And ensure that we’re protecting our citizens and not letting federal influence dominate how we are governing and how we’re addressing issues of people wanting to use their rights of free speech on our streets.
Miller: Portland went from being a national darling in, I don’t know, 20, 15 years ago to being a symbol of chaos, and fires, and riots, and homelessness, and public drug use. Both of those were huge exaggerations, but those narratives have power. They do lead to people choosing to move here or to move away, businesses expanding or taking themselves out of downtown. How do you change a public narrative, a nationwide narrative about a city?
Avalos: That’s actually one of the main reasons that I joined up with a lot of Portlanders to create what we call Portland For All. We felt that there was a vacuum of leadership, and when you don’t provide progressive solutions to our problems and you let that narrative run its course, then folks don’t understand what are the options that they should be championing and encouraging their leaders to select. And so us being able to really shift that narrative, through putting boots on the ground, talking to our neighbors, creating opportunities for folks to voice their concerns and places for us to talk about those solutions, that is how we change the narrative. And I believe Portland For All is doing that.
Miller: What should the city do, or what should it do more of, to address climate change?
Avalos: All these questions are for me, aren’t they?
Miller: These are just random questions, but I’m glad that you like your selection.
Avalos: Well, as the executive director of Verde, we all understand that climate change is now. It is not tomorrow, it is not yesterday. And so infrastructure is at the core of that, but also ensuring that we are delivering that infrastructure to communities who are at the front lines of climate change, which is East Portland. Front line communities are those who have been historically under-resourced and are experiencing the impacts of climate change due to that lack of resources. So lack of tree canopy, lack of basic infrastructure to ensure that we are protecting each other from heat waves and from other climate dangers. It’s important that the infrastructure is at the core and as we build our city, we have to consider what a climate resilient city looks like in every single decision.
Miller: That was Candace Avalos, the executive director of Verde.
David Linn is the next candidate we’ll hear from. He is an executive assistant at the Oregon Board of Examiners for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology. He got the same first question. What do you see as the biggest issue facing your district?
David Linn: Yes. Well, Portland, historically – East Portland, historically – has faced a disproportionate de-investment in it over the years, and we see that in an interrelated amount of issues, whether it’s homelessness, public safety or community engagement, as many people have pointed out. We have a disproportionate amount of people who are living paycheck to paycheck. We have a disproportionate amount of people with housing affordability issues, people living on fixed incomes or in adult care homes. So all these contribute to, with this lack of investment … so it bleeds especially from the homelessness issue. And that is first and foremost in everybody’s mind, but then it also is in public safety.
When we look at our MAX stops, whether it’s 122nd or 142nd, we see how the city has neglected to do basic things like clean them, make sure that there’s cameras working, that can hold people accountable for their behaviors on public transit. And that has just left East Portlanders with this kind of feeling left abandoned by the city council. And so that’s what we really want to change with new representation.
Miller: Specifically, how? I mean, what would you do as a member of the city council to address everything you just talked about?
Linn: Well, again, getting our resources into East Portland that’s commensurate with our size and part of the city. Number one, that’s on the housing forum. For years, we’re having to deal with almost more than a decade of neglect. Every time they opened a shelter, one would close, like on 122nd and Gleason. So we need to aggressively go after a lot of the properties that are blighted, the zombie houses, the abandoned lots people have mentioned, and use the city’s leverage to aggressively build permanent, affordable housing for people.
Miller: How do you see recruitment for tax increment financing community leadership committees? Your turn for this.
Linn: This was perfect because, as president of the Centennial Community Association, I have been attending the East Portland TIF District. So I’ve been listening to my community members already describe the kind of projects they have and the anxiety they have around urban redevelopment. There is a real concern that if you put a lot of investment into a community, that does cause the rents to go up and the housing prices to go up. And how is the city gonna ensure that we are not displacing people who have now made their homes here?
Miller: It seems like you’re maybe not even the audience, you are already a part of that. But the question was how do you get other people to take part in something like that?
Linn: Well, we have to do an aggressive recruiting. It’s not just at the neighborhood association level. That’s one part, but you need to go to all facets of the community. There’s people volunteering with the schools, with local businesses. And there’s a lot of different community groups who you are not gonna reach if you just go to the neighborhood association meeting. I know from running one. You need to go to all the communities and all the community groups, and you need to go and meet them where they’re at and involve them in a meaningful way. You don’t just use it like it’s a formality or a box to be checked. You actually go and listen with the plan of, how do you incorporate their values into the tax increment financing?
Miller: Would you want to make any major changes in terms of how much money various bureaus get?
Linn: Well, I, of course, would love more resources to be put into the Office of Civic Life. I think you can’t have community engagement when you expect a lot of these neighborhood groups to work on a $0 budget. And many times, the city doesn’t even care if there is an association or a meeting happening. So we need enough to ramp up at least like five more staff members per district to really help the new city council with their constituent services and being those conduits with the community.
Miller: David Linn, thanks very much.
Linn: Thank you.
Miller: That’s David Linn, the executive assistant for the Oregon Board of Examiners for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology.
Noah Ernst is next. Noah Ernst is superintendent and in-house attorney at Radio Cab. Noah, what do you see as the most urgent issue facing your district?
Noah Ernst: I think it has to be public safety. And I say that because there are so many things that we want to do and that people want to do in the city of Portland that won’t work until we address public safety. You’re not going to get people to ride public transportation if they don’t think it’s safe. If it isn’t safe, if people are smoking fentanyl on it, it’s not gonna happen. You’re not gonna get people to parks, you’re not gonna get people to public spaces, you’re not gonna get them walking to work, all those things unless they feel safe. And so I think that really is number one and that means addressing the fact that we don’t have enough officers right now to respond quickly to 911 calls or to respond when people need help. I think that’s just fundamental.
Miller: What else would you do to address the issue that you’re bringing up?
Ernst: Well, I think again, the first thing is we have to make sure that we have enough officers for a city the size of Portland. The average number of officers is approximately 16 to 20 per 10,000 people of population, and we’re currently just above 12. It just isn’t enough for best practice. We’re clearly seeing it’s not enough to respond quickly. It’s not enough to reduce 911 hold times and we really need to address that.
I think the other thing you have to do to address public safety is really work with community organizations that are out there trying to prevent violence before it starts, trying to work with people who have a higher likelihood of making bad decisions when they’re young, so that we can try to change the trajectory of their lives before they’re engaging in the kind of public safety things. Then obviously, we have to address homelessness so that people aren’t, as people have said before, confronted with needles, confronted with human waste, confronted with all the different negative sides of having a camp or homeless people living in your area.
And I think fundamentally, the number one thing we have to do to address all the issues is hold the city accountable for where its money is going, right? We know that we spent $62,000 per homeless person last year. We’ve spent more than that in previous years and yet we have more homeless people than ever. And I think the people of Portland have a right to say, where is this money going? Why are we not achieving results? And on city council, I will be incredibly focused on holding the bureaus accountable for where they’re spending the money, holding nonprofits that we contract with accountable for achieving measurable goals …
Miller: What issue do you think doesn’t get enough attention in this race?
Ernst: I think what doesn’t get enough attention is the ways in which the city has imposed things on East Portland, knowing that East Portland doesn’t want them. And perfect examples of that are things like Division, where nobody wanted what’s gone on to Division. People protested what’s gone on in Division in terms of putting in those medians and changing the flow of traffic. The businesses along it came to City Hall and said, we don’t want this. It’s gonna hurt our businesses. If I talk to anybody in the vicinity of Division Street, and I say I will do something about Division, they say you have my vote and I will give you money besides. That’s how angry they are and the city knew it before they did it.
We need to listen to the people of East Portland. They know what they need, they know what they want. They know how City Hall needs to help them. And City Hall needs to actually listen.
Miller: Noah Ernst, thanks very much.
Ernst: Thank you.
Miller: Noah Ernst is superintendent and in-house attorney at Radio Cab.
Process of elimination tells me that it’s Timur Ender who is joining us now. Timur Ender is an infrastructure project manager. Welcome to this conversation.
Timur Ender: Thanks, pleasure to be here.
Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue that District 1 is facing?
Ender: I would say community safety.
Miller: What would you do to address it?
Ender: Sure. A number of things. I look at community safety holistically, whether that’s gun violence, whether that’s traffic crashes. Important to point out, East Portlanders today face a life expectancy 10 years less than people living west of 82nd Avenue. This is due to a lot of the under investment that has happened.
In terms of specific actions that I would take, one would be a voluntary gun buyback program to reduce gun violence. It would be things like violence interrupters. I champion things like Portland Street Response and public safety support specialists that complement the role of police officers. And then, as someone who’s managed $30 million of infrastructure budgets at the city, I always look at things from a financial perspective and the more we can do in prevention, we’re really gonna see more results. The second a gunshot is fired, we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars within 30 minutes on a whole host of responses.
Miller: What endorsement are you most proud of and why?
Ender: I guess I’m gonna cheat and just mention two. East County Rising and APANO – Asian Pacific Action Network of Oregon – because these are organizations that are grounded in East Portland and represent really a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of perspectives. East Portland has 100 languages represented. I’m proud to be part of that diversity. Our family speaks Turkish at home. I’m very aligned with the values of these organizations, whether it’s supporting public transit, increasing tree canopy, ensuring our immigrants are safe and welcome in our communities. So those would be my responses.
Miller: As I mentioned, former President Trump said about a week-and-a-half ago that he would surge federal law enforcement into every sanctuary city if he were reelected. How would you want Portland to respond?
Ender: We have to control our story. I cannot control President Trump. I cannot control federal officials. What I can control as a city council member is the city of Portland’s budget, resources and police officers. And that’s fine if that’s the game Donald Trump wants to play, but we will not be deputizing local police to be an extension of Donald Trump.
Miller: What do you want to see from Portland Street Response which has shown promise but has had a relatively slow ramp-up citywide in recent years?
Ender: For Portland Street Response?
Miller: Yeah.
Ender: I’m a big proponent of Portland Street Response. I’m proud to have signed the pledge. I am committed to the future of that program. So things like 24/7 response, making it available throughout the city. And really, for me, the value of Portland Street Response is it’s able to buy time for the people that it serves and that’s gonna be critical. So I support enhancing that program, allowing people to enter private residences or, if we need to, block a lane of traffic so someone could have an honest conversation for a minute, then we should be able to do that.
Miller: You would be one vote among 12 and you need to get to six of your colleagues at least sign on if you want to do anything, if you want to pass ordinances. What experience do you have in building consensus like that?
Ender: I’m proud to have launched the Fixed Speed Safety Program, the Fixed Speed Safety Camera Program, which has saved lives in East Portland. I’m proud to have helped launch the Fixing Our Streets Program, which is the 10 cent gas tax. We had to work with a wide variety of stakeholders, whether that’s labor, business, advocacy groups, to ensure that was successful, both getting on the ballot and ultimately passed. And really, one of the things we did was we had a four year sunset unless it was renewed by the voters. We had certain elements in there that allowed various different interest groups to be OK moving that proposal forward. So I’m proud of the work we did there.
Miller: Timur Ender, thanks very much.
Ender: Thank you.
Miller: We finished the forum with a lightning round where candidates had a shorter time to answer questions – some of them serious, some of them much less so. I started by asking everyone what they would want for their last meal.
Timur?
Ender: Ben and Jerry’s vegan chocolate chip cookie dough.
Miller: OK. Doug Clove?
Clove: Prime rib.
Miller: David Linn?
Linn: Spicy Thai fried rice.
Miller: Steph Routh?
Routh: Ice cream.
Miller: Just any ice cream. OK. Cayle Tern?
Tern: A bowl of pho.
Miller: OK. Jamie Dunphy?
Dunphy: Yeah. Like a chocolate cream pie.
Miller: Noah Ernst, last meal?
Ernst: Pepperoni pizza.
Miller: Terrence Hayes?
Hayes: (laughing) German chocolate cake.
Miller: Yeah, that’s all right.
Hayes: I still … German chocolate cake. I’m gonna stick there.
Miller: Candace Avalos?
Avalos: Huevos Rancheros.
Miller: Thomas Shervey?
Shervey: The rarest truffle in the world to extend my lifetime while they search for it.
Miller: Loretta Smith?
Smith: I’d like to have my mother’s macaroni and cheese, and ribs, and collard greens.
Miller: Candace – cats, dogs or both?
Avalos: Cats.
Miller: Thomas Shervey, where do you go or what do you do to get yourself out of a funk?
Shervey: I go and play some Dungeons and Dragons.
Miller: OK. Loretta Smith, what was your favorite concert?
Smith: Maze and Frankie Beverly.
Miller: Jamie Dunphy, what is your favorite Portland sports team?
Dunphy: Oh, God, I’m not a … the Pickles.
Miller: OK. Cayle Tern, what’s your favorite spot in all of District 1?
Tern: Favorite spot? The boat launch on 33rd/Armory.
Miller: OK. Steph Routh, an alien from outer space lands in Portland and asks you for a location, a recommendation for where to take a selfie? Where do you send them?
Routh: (laughing) I send them to the top of Luuwit View Park.
Miller: David Linn, where should naloxone be available?
Linn: Naloxone should be available all over and readily available in all clinics, stores, schools, nonprofits and small businesses.
Miller: Go-to karaoke song. Doug Clove?
Clove: “Wooly Bully.”
Miller: OK. Timur Ender, first job?
Ender: Soccer referee.
Miller: Terrence, do you have a political hero?
Hayes: Obama.
Miller: Barack Obama. OK.
Noah Ernst, if you could time travel to another century, which one would you choose?
Ernst: How about specifically 1930s England, as long as I’m rich.
Miller: Those were 11 of the candidates running for seats in District 1 on the soon to be enlarged Portland City Council. We’re gonna have our next live event in this series one week from today. That’s Thursday, October 17. It’ll be for District 2 which includes most of North and Northeast Portland, including St. John’s, Kenton, Cully and Irvington. We’ll be at Oakshire Beer Hall. Doors open at 6 p.m. And I have to say the live events really are much more fun with more questions in the lightning round and just more time to get to know the candidates. So we really hope to see you there.
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