Portland City Council District 4 candidates forum

In 2022, Portland residents voted to overhaul the city’s form of government. That includes using ranked choice voting to expand the number of seats on city council from five to 12. Another major change is the creation of four geographic districts in the city. Voters within each district will now elect three candidates to represent them on the new council.

Thirty registered candidates are competing in District 4, which includes all of Portland west of the Willamette River, including Downtown, the Pearl District, Multnomah and Hillsdale neighborhoods. It also contains the inner southeast neighborhoods of Sellwood-Moreland, Eastmoreland, Reed and Ardenwald.

On Oct. 24, “Think Out Loud” convened a D4 candidates forum at John’s Marketplace in Multnomah Village. We invited the 13 candidates with the largest number of individual donors who contributed to their campaigns. They include: Eli Arnold, Olivia Clark, Lisa Freeman, Mitch Green, Chris Henry, Ben Hufford, Chad Lykins, Tony Morse, Stanley Penkin, Moses Ross, Sarah Silkie, Bob Weinstein and Eric Zimmerman.

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. We’re going to spend the hour today listening to part of a Portland City Council candidate forum that we held recently. It was for District 4, which includes all of Portland west of the Willamette River, along with a portion of inner Southeast Portland. We did it in front of an audience at John’s Marketplace in Multnomah Village.

As for all of these forums, we made the decision to limit the number of candidates on the stage. Invitations were based on the number of individual donors who contributed to their campaigns. I started by drawing a name at random.

Miller: Sarah Silkie starts us off. Sarah Silkie is a civil engineer. Welcome.

Sarah Silkie: Thank you.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue facing this district and this city?

Silkie: I’m gonna say the cost of living, combined with homelessness, is the biggest issue both in District 4 and the city.

Miller: What would you do about it?

Silkie: There’s no one single thing to do about it. But first off, we need to end unsheltered homelessness. We need to treat it like the emergency that it is. The previous city councils have been declaring a housing emergency every year since 2015. We still have over 5,000 unsheltered folks on our streets and less than 3,000 shelter beds. I say that we convert unused buildings. We have lots of unused office space right now. We put up partitions, rooms with doors, and get people sheltered as soon as possible.

Long-term, like you said, I’m a civil engineer. I’ve been working for the city for 12 years, the last two in permitting, and we need to seriously reform our permitting system. Everybody up here is gonna say that we need to reform permitting. I’m the only one who has worked in permitting and knows the codes that actually need to be changed, and can tell you when the bureaus are just being stubborn, and when it’s a real issue.

Miller: You would be one vote among 12, meaning you need to build a coalition, get six votes at least, to get anything done. What experience do you have doing that – building coalitions?

Silkie: I am the oldest of six kids [Laughter]. So I’ve done a fair amount of coalition building. Also, in my current work reviewing permits, people tell you one of the problems is that we have rules created by all of the different bureaus and they sometimes conflict with each other. There’s not enough space in the public right of way to make everything work. And so you have applicants come in, and trying to find the solution that works for the developer, and is not exorbitantly expensive, and is aligned with all of the bureaus is quite a challenge. So I regularly build alliances amongst the different stakeholders to get things done.

Miller: Current city council members have six or seven staff members. The plan now seems to be that you would each … if you’re elected, you would have one. How would you prioritize their time?

Silkie: If we only have one staff, we’re gonna have to do a lot ourselves. But constituent services are gonna be critical. The other thing is good policy requires some research. We shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel. We should be looking at what other cities do and what works. And so I’m gonna have them do research.

Miller: Our listener Greg said, “What’s your vision for an integrated mental health, physical health and housing program for the unsheltered?” You have 36 seconds. I apologize.

Silkie: I’m gonna talk to the professionals about how to do all of that, because it’s a little bit complicated. The city has authority over housing codes, building and construction. The city does not have jurisdiction over mental health. So we have to collaborate with the county and the state to bring everything together. And obviously that means talking, collaborating, getting everybody in the same room and moving forward on the things that are essential and letting go of the things around the edges.

Miller: Sarah Silkie, thanks very much.

Eli Arnold is a Portland police officer and a member of PPBs Central Bike Squad. What do you see as the biggest issue facing this district and this city?

Eli Arnold: It’s really the intersection of homelessness and public safety. You know, we really ought to treat it like it is an emergency, like we were the aftermath of a disaster. So we have a bunch of people laying out on streets, with different issues: injuries, mental health problems, what have you. We don’t know exactly who they are, where they are, or how to provide services to them with any sort of continuity. It makes it impossible for us to be effective in delivering services.

So, even if we can’t solve it tomorrow, we can start managing it. We can find out where people are, stabilize them geographically, and start tracking what we’re getting to them. We can’t wait another year for that to start getting better. And these people have such severe needs that they’re straining every part of our First Responder systems and we can’t build capacity in those systems quickly. But if we can alleviate some of the needs of this group, it will free up capacity so that you can get 911 calls answered in a reasonable amount of time and expect there’s an ambulance waiting if you need one.

Miller: “Please describe,” asked one of our listeners, “what you understand to be the role of a city councilperson under the new form of government, and what are your qualifications for that new and particular role?”

Arnold: Well, the role is gonna be split. It’s going to be devising policy and responding to constituent needs, which I see as being a troubleshooter or a “special complainer” on your behalf. So, on that end, it’s really just staying in touch with the neighborhoods, what sort of needs people are having, and taking those to the relevant operations personnel.

And on the other end, it’s really forming a team with 11 other people to figure out how we can come together, what kind of consensus we can find on devising policy to make some kind of progress. And we’re probably going to have a greater spread of ideas and ideological positions than in the past. So we just need to accept that, and just find where we can draw a circle around enough votes to make some sort of progress.

Miller: What have you learned that has surprised you as you’ve been going out talking to neighbors, canvassing, asking for votes?

Arnold: You know, I feel pretty in touch, because every single day I go out and I respond to the point where there’s a breakdown – where policy is failing somebody, where they’re struggling, where they’re dealing with some sort of intense feeling. I think you hear those same things. And it really is homelessness and public safety. And, “I don’t feel like I’m getting value for the money I’m putting in here. And I don’t feel like the city is concerned about what I’m concerned about.”

Miller: In other words, you haven’t, then, been surprised, because you feel like your job has provided the same set of experiences that you’re hearing about from people when you knock on their doors?

Arnold: Yeah. Hearing people’s deeply held concerns is the regular.

Miller: This is a randomly chosen question that just goes to you: In a recent poll by The Oregonian, 56% of Portland voters said they strongly or somewhat support, “stepped up law enforcement efforts to reduce unsheltered homelessness, and sending to jail anyone who’s caught repeatedly breaking anti-camping ordinances.” Briefly, do you support that as well?

Arnold: I think the new camping ban is a necessary tool. It has to be paired with us providing places for people to go, which it requires. But when we provide places for people to go, we need to be able to say, “You can’t camp next to the school. We have a place for you.”

Miller: Eli Arnold, thanks very much.

Arnold: Thank you.

Miller: Stanley Penkin is retired from a career in construction management. Good to have you here.

Stanley Penkin: Thank you.

Miller: Same first question to you: What do you see as the biggest issue that this district and this city is facing?

Penkin: We have so many issues – homelessness and public safety are at the top of everybody’s list. That cuts across the entire city, as well as our district. There are other issues, too. There is the environment, there’s transportation. There is, in this district, what a lot of people are not aware of, is the CEI Hub – the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub – that’s at a huge risk should there be an earthquake, lightning, a derailment, real danger. That’s something that we have to deal with.

But what I see as the biggest issue, is that we have to have a functioning government, and this new system gives us an opportunity to reset policies, bring in new ideas, but we have to work together. And that’s one of the reasons that impelled me to run, because I think I can bring problem-solving and collaboration to a new city council. For example, we have a district with three councilors – who’s responsible for what? If you, as a constituent, have a question, have a problem, who are you going to go to? We need to figure that out.

We also need to figure out how to work across all the districts, and it will take seven votes to get something done. And we have to be really careful that we don’t fall back into silos by looking at issues just in our district. We have to look at the city holistically. I see that as the most important issue, is getting a city that works again.

Miller: Portland went from being a national media darling to being a national example of chaos, chaos in various forms. Both of those were caricatures, but they had power. How do you change the narrative of a city?

Penkin: Well, I think we change the narrative … first of all, we need to bring back our downtown. We need a vibrant and thriving downtown that becomes the center of our economy and culture. I’ve been very involved in arts and culture ever since moving here from New York 21 years ago. I think the arts can be a catalyst in bringing back our city. And that includes culinary arts, and includes makers, includes artisans, includes galleries, and includes a whole vast array of the arts and culture community. And I think that’s part of what got us the reputation that we did, and we have a lot of good things happening. We’re gonna have a Keller Auditorium, possibly another auditorium at PSU. We’re going to have a James Beard Market. We have a Rothko Pavilion at the Portland Art Museum that’s being built right now, a world class facility. So, all those things will help bring us back and change our reputation.

Miller: This came from a member of the audience here: “What’s your stance on the 2020 ‘Black Lives Matter’ summer in Portland? As a city council member, how would you handle such events?”

Penkin: Well, that’s a tough question. That, unfortunately, was a situation that got out of control. I don’t think our city was prepared to handle it. I think right now, I know that our Police Bureau and other law enforcement agencies are working on a plan for November 5th, should things go the way they went last time. So we have a city right now that learned their lessons from 2020, and is going to do … hopefully we don’t have that issue. But if we do, I think it will be controlled in a much better fashion.

Miller: Stan Penkin, thanks very much.

Penkin: Thank you.

Miller: Mitch Green joins me now. He is an energy economist. Good to have you here.

Mitch Green: Great to be here.

Miller: Same first question to you: What do you see as the biggest issue facing our city and your district?

Green: I think, on everyone’s mind in District 4 is homelessness and crime, and we’re gonna deal with that in the first session of city council. But I think that the most urgent issue, from the standpoint of what city council needs to do to set up budgets for a resilient city, is to get away from this model where we only spend money on new urban renewal projects at the expense of our main programmatic core. Because we’ve lost faith in this city among our progressives, people of all political stripes, that we’re gonna take our values and move them into action, and that’s a really dangerous place to be in a city right now. We need to regain the faith of the people in our city that we can govern. So I think we need to reprioritize keeping our bureaus whole and spending directly on programs that keep people housed.

Miller: How will you assess if this whole new system of government is working?

Green: I’m gonna get phone calls every day if it’s not. But I think that we’re gonna have to be proactive and not wait for the bad signals. The new committee structure that the 12 city council members will staff and spend time in, we’re gonna be able to check in and do a pulse check month-by-month, and make sure that we set up metrics, we have a dashboard, to make sure our city administrator is executing our policy plans.

Miller: It’s another question from somebody here: “How do you propose implementing PDX’s climate emergency plans, and how high a priority is it, in your opinion?”

Green: That’s a great question. We really need to increase staffing and dollars for our Bureau of Emergency Management. It’s criminally understaffed and we have a lurking, ticking time bomb in Linnton and our railroad …

Miller: You’re talking about the Critical Energy Hub.

Green: I am, yes. And also, we can take proactive measures to get ahead of the crisis by doing things like revoking Zenith Energy’s Land Use Compatibility Statement [LUCS]. And that’s something that the city council can be very aggressive on.

Miller: Most candidates favor increasing police or [Portland] Street Response. This, too, came from somebody in this audience here. They asked, “If you also favor increasing police or Street Response, how will you pay for it, and what would you cut?”

Green: I favor increasing funding for Portland Street Response. I think they only need a budget of about $20 million to operate 24/7, and then be eligible for federal matching funds.

Miller: It’s something like, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m, now?

Green: Yeah, it needs to be 24/7 because a lot of the calls happen at night. And I think that type of investment pays for itself by lowering the requirement on overtime that’s in the other public safety budgets.

Miller: Earlier this week, financial analysts told the current city council that the next council – you, if voters put you there – [is] gonna have to cut at least 5% from the city budget. They said “at least,” and it’s likely gonna be higher than that. What’s gonna guide your decision making as you and 11 other people make really hard decisions?

Green: I will just say that they said that on a Tuesday, and on a Wednesday they discussed adopting six new Tax Increment Financing [TIF] districts that added new programmatic expenditures to our general fund. And so that’s something that a lot of people don’t know about, and that’s a big issue for me. Nothing I can do about that. But I think what guides those cuts, you don’t do across the board 5% cuts. You look at areas that are less urgent on the triage scale and say, maybe we delay this hire.

Miller: What’s an example of that? I mean, are you prepared now to say what’s less urgent?

Green: Yeah, I’ll say right now, and I won’t win any friends in the Portland Housing Bureau for this, but I would pause the inclusionary zoning program because I don’t think that we know how much benefit it has brought in terms of its return on investment.

Miller: Mitch Green, thanks very much.

Green: Thanks.

Miller: Lisa Freeman joins me now. She spent much of her career working to support government transitions in over a dozen countries. More recently, she worked on gun violence prevention for the City of Portland. What do you see as the most urgent issue that the city and this district is facing?

Lisa Freeman: I would say public safety, and specifically, we’re in a critical moment where we have to decide as a city what kind of a public safety system we want, and what it looks like to have a robust public safety system. I worked at the city in public safety for two-and-a-half years on gun violence reduction. We had success in that. Gun violence is down 30% since its peak in 2022. And I also supported innovations to our public safety system, like Portland Street Response.

I led a call allocation study that looked at all of the calls coming into 911, and looked at who is currently assigned to respond to those, and is there a different allocation that could make better use – not just of Portland Street Response, but of our Community Health Assess and Treat [CHAT] program and Fire, of our public safety support specialist program within the Police Bureau. And the study found that at least a third of calls could be diverted to nontraditional responders. So I think making sure that we’re supporting our community-based responses and really building robustness into the system is something we need to focus on.

Miller: Whether it is a renovated Keller Auditorium or a proposed Major League baseball stadium, how will you approach votes on the possibility of public money going to various kinds of huge capital investments?

Freeman: I think the question guiding those investments is, what is the public benefit? Public money should always be spent for public benefit, not just to benefit a few or one particular company. I think in terms of Major League baseball, for example, we have examples from all over the United States that investments in types of sports stadiums do not yield a public benefit. So that’s the question that I would be asking.

Miller: Do you think that the arts are more likely to?

Freeman: I think that arts are more likely to, yes. And I think specifically, making sure that arts are available to people of all income levels within Portland. That’s one of the best parts about Portland. And making sure that artists can afford to live here, and that Portland is really about its local art, not bringing people in from outside. I think that’s worth public investment.

Miller: Here’s another question that came from somebody who’s right in front of you, somewhere: “Any chance of addressing the high water rate in Portland?”

Freeman: The high water rate … I will be honest, I do not know. Looking from a climate perspective, and how important water is, and how critical of a resource, I think across the board, we probably underpay for what water is really worth.

Miller: I’m gonna see if I can squeeze in one more question here, from somebody in the audience: “What are the specific deliverables we should use to measure your performance in year one or in year two of your term?”

Freeman: I definitely think it depends on, do you have confidence that this new form of government is working? Do you feel like things are better in six months, in one year, and two years, than they were before?’ And that’s the critical piece. I feel like there’s a crisis in confidence in government and we have to be able to build back that trust.

Miller: Lisa Freeman, thanks very much.

Freeman: Thank you.

Miller: Moses Ross joins me now. He is a political consultant. Same first question to you: What do you see as the biggest issues that we’re facing in the city and in the district?

Moses Ross: In this district, to me, the most important issues are livability issues. The livability, the challenges from the downtown core have been starting to seep into the outer neighborhoods, and we must start to mitigate those challenges. Like what we’ve done here in Multnomah Village – we’ve listened to the community, we’ve involved the community into the process, and we’ve gone out and we’ve picked up the trash. We’ve created programs to clean off the graffiti, we’ve gone and towed the abandoned cars and we’ve established a sense of community pride, which is palatable. Look at this crowd. And I think that if we take that approach and establish a good solid foundation of community involvement in the process, we can take on any challenge that the city has.

Miller: How do you do that?

Ross: Well, you have to listen and learn and respect the views of the people in the neighborhoods. And that’s one thing that our city council, right now, has not been doing. They tend to govern by fiat and that’s very frustrating for folks that are directly on the front lines of the challenges of our city.

Miller: We got this question: “What do you see as an issue that is a bigger deal in this district, District 4, than in the rest of the city?”

Ross: Oh, it’s all about safe biking and transportation issues, I think ...

Miller: Bigger here, than in East Portland?

Ross: Oh, very much so. I mean, they’re equal. There’s the same amount, there are more unpaved sidewalks and streets in the west side than there are on the east side. Many people think it’s the opposite, but it’s the truth. So we need to make sure that our kids can walk safely to Maplewood, that our kids can walk safely to Ida B. Wells, that they can get to work, that we can safely walk down the street and go to the Safeway without having to worry about getting hit by a car.

Miller: This next question is related. It came from somebody in the audience: “On a scale of 1 to 10, from least to most important, where do you rank filling the potholes and paving all municipal roads?”

Ross: You know, what we’re talking about here is fundamental public services that have been sorely lacking by the city when it comes to our neighborhoods. They need to be number one priority. Filling the potholes is the most obvious thing that we should be doing as a city, but we don’t. And so what happens? You break a tire, you break an axle, you get a flat tire, you see all the challenges that people have. It just creates this atmosphere of disrespect.

Miller: What do you plan to do about the increased vacancy of commercial buildings?

Ross: Well, we have to have an economy that is attracted to them. We need to, first, take all of those offices and the empty office buildings in downtown Portland, and determine which ones can be converted to affordable housing. It’s only gonna be about 10% of them out of the whole inventory, but that still represents hundreds, if not thousands of potential homes.

We need to also then, in turn, make a conscious effort to revitalize the downtown core. People are afraid to go downtown. Businesses are afraid to invest in downtown. And so I have a model that I’ve based off of a very successful one in Philadelphia called the Portland Clean and Green Program, where we go throughout the entire city, neighborhood by neighborhood, involving the neighborhood associations and the community-based organizations, and the faith-based organizations. And we pick up the trash, we clean up the graffiti and make this a place where we are proud to live in.

Miller: Moses Ross, thanks very much.

Ross: Thank you.

Miller: Bob Weinstein joins me now, a former special education teacher, former school superintendent, served as mayor of Ketchikan, Alaska for about a dozen years. What do you see as the biggest issues that the city and the district are facing?

Bob Weinstein: I see the biggest issue facing the district and the city as not having sensible spending and taxation policies. Unless you make $25 million, we have the highest combined state and city taxes in the United States. Other cities are doing more with less. So what I want to see happen is the development of what I call a critical needs budget policy, where the vast majority of our existing funds – no new taxes – go to meet what I have heard during my campaign, which started in January, critical needs. That includes fixing homelessness, I don’t think we need more money for that. We need better coordinations, or I should say coordination with the county, so that we effectively spend the money that we both have.

It includes public safety. I support increasing staffing in the police department, the fire department, and Portland Street Response. And let me say why. Out of 50 major cities in the United States, we’re number 48 in the number of police officers per 1,000 people. And District 4, at least until lately, has had the highest homicide and violent crime rate in the city of Portland. Downtown Portland has had that. We need to increase the police presence there. In September of 2022, the Fire Bureau had a study that said they need six new fire stations throughout the city in order to give everybody the same four or six minute response time, which currently doesn’t happen. Most of the calls the fire department gets now are medical in nature. Every minute is a life and death issue. And then I’m not gonna talk a lot about Portland Street Response, others have. We need to increase the non-law enforcement response to nonviolent, nonthreatening behavioral issues.

Miller: With no new taxes, but a big increase in money for police and fire, what would you cut?

Weinstein: Well, I’m not an expert on the city budget. I did ask what’s called the transition team to invite all the candidates to a budget overview session. They did not want to do that. But I’ll give some examples. We have what’s called a transition team at City Hall that’s made recommendations to the current council … which, with little exception, has rubber stamped them. That includes tens of millions for new bureaucracy. It includes, for example, a centralized office of communications. That makes sense. But at a meeting, long after the council approved that last November, the interim manager told the group we have 85 communications staff in the six service areas. Do the math, that’s 12 communications people in each of the bureaus. He said, “Well, I guess we’ll have to look at that, but we won’t lay anybody off or make any changes.” So we need to decide, do we want 85 communications people, or do we want more public safety people across the spectrum that I mentioned?

Miller: Bob Weinstein, thank you very much.

Weinstein: Those are some examples.

Miller: Chad Lykins owns Rose City Chess, which provides coaching, after school clubs, tournaments and camps. Good to have you here.

Chad Lykins: Thank you.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest issue that the city and the district is facing?

Lykins: The biggest issue we’re facing right now, the most urgent thing, is homelessness and housing affordability. It’s gonna be hard to be a safe city or a place where small businesses and families can thrive so long as we’ve got 5,000 people that are unsheltered. And these are the things that unlock everything else that makes it possible. It’s gonna be hard to bring families back to Portland unless they have affordable places to live. It’s gonna be hard to have a thriving downtown unless people can live there and be close to the places they want to work. Transportation starts to pencil out once you have our neighborhoods starting to thicken up, so we can have more bus routes here in Multnomah Village and the rest of Southwest Portland.

Miller: A listener online asks, “How do you propose to help arts and culture organizations that are still struggling for audiences after COVID?”

Lykins: This is really good. And one of the things is RACC [Regional Arts and Culture Council] needs to be rethought, and we need to be thinking about the Arts Tax. Who here loves paying their Arts Tax? This Arts Tax, this little $35 per head tax, is gonna cause a tax revolt. So we’ve got to rethink how we do it, with something that has lower administrative costs and brings more money to where it’s needed. That’s arts programs in schools and into the pockets of independent artists.

Miller: This question came from somebody in the audience here: “How do you propose to increase cooperation with Multnomah County on mental health services?”

Lykins: The big dividing line between candidates here is really about how we want to shelter people. And we have got to have a system, which is where 80% of Portlanders are. 80 percent of us in Portland think that we need to shelter somebody in a place that gives them a room with a door that locks, and brings the services on site. You don’t say, “Go out across town on Tuesday at 8 a.m. and get treatment.” It’s got to be there on site, like we do here at the Multnomah Safe Rest Village, which we’re very proud to host. I think if we do that and we follow the science on this, we know we can move people to permanent housing at four times the rate.

The city’s job is siting and permitting these things, and we gotta have the county come and operate it. So in my first 90 days, I will site and permit 20 new locations. Two sources that we want to go through, first. City-owned land is the first one. Like the city bought this from the federal government for the Sears Armory. And then the other thing is, there’s a lot of people that own motels in Portland that don’t want to own motels anymore because vacancy rates are high. So that’s another good model, it gives you the room with a door that locks. So we should have RFPs [Requests for Proposals] out to every single motel owner asking them, what’s their price? The ones that we’ve done in the past allowed us to buy those at about a third of the cost of building these new.

Miller: So the city version of Project Turnkey, the state project.

A couple of folks have talked about the CEI Hub. It’s in Northwest Portland, in a particularly vulnerable spot in the event of an earthquake, as I think all of you in this audience here know … folks on the radio may be familiar with it. What would you do to mitigate that risk?

Lykins: There’s a couple of things we need to do immediately and then we need to make a long-term plan. We need to force them to do seismic retrofitting, and force them to accept the financial cost of operating this. Right now, they internalize all the profits and they externalize all of the risk. So risk bonding will force them to do that. Long term? We don’t have answers to two very important questions. The first one is, how much does it cost to relocate? And the second one is, where could it go, that wouldn’t just prove to move the burden to a new community? So we want to get the state and federal government to fund a study to allow us to answer those questions, so we can make a path forward.

Miller: Chad Lykins, thanks very much.

Eric Zimmerman is the chief of staff to Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards. Good to have you here.

Eric Zimmerman: Thank you.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest issues that you’re facing in this district and in the city?

Zimmerman: Our district, the whole city, public safety is front of mind for everybody. It’s related to street camping, it’s related to open air drug use. And I think that the more that we create a shelter package, and actually can enforce the camping laws and enforce the open drug market, then we have a chance to improve public safety. That’s front of mind for everybody.

Miller: Linnea N. asked, “Other cities with multi-member districts have found that no one representative is willing to take responsibility for what the city is doing in their district. How would you be accountable to your constituents?”

Zimmerman: You know, I’ve been a deputy city manager in this form of government, and one of the cities I was the deputy manager in, we had multi-member, and I’ve seen it work. I think that you have to have coalitions built amongst different districts. But at the end of the day, I think it’s really important that a city councilor, and the city council as a whole, understand that their role is to set some guidance, provide resources and a direction so that that city management team, the executives whose job it is to go implement all of our needs and wants and address all of our concerns, that it happens.

When that breaks down is when city councilors start playing a turf war, and they try to do the operational job in this new form of government, instead of being an advocate so that there are resources to take care of the job by the city manager. So, I think working to support that system is the best way for me to make sure that I’m not pointing the finger at someone else’s job. I’ll advocate for this district and be a friend to other districts as well.

But I also think that we’re gonna learn each other’s strengths. If you take the endorsement from the Willamette Week and The Oregonian, you take Olivia and you take Eli, you take myself, we all bring different levels of experience. Eli, at a local level, me in city hall, in terms of getting coalitions and building ordinances, and Olivia at getting us resources and working with Salem, so that Salem doesn’t leave us alone. That kind of partnership is something that I think is really important. But at the end of the day, it’s going to be the constituents who say, “You’re dodging that, you’re not taking care of what is happening on Multnomah Boulevard or on 28th.” And we’ve got to be accountable to that. And luckily there’s another election in two years and you get to tell us if we did a good job or not.

Miller: What is an issue you think does not get enough attention in this race?

Zimmerman: We talk a lot about our crisis, and I firmly believe that we have to spend the next two years coming out of crisis, because if you are always in crisis, you can never think about the next bigger thing. But I do think there is space for, “What is the next bigger thing?” Is that baseball in Portland? Is that a revived Arts scene? Is that a healthier field at every single school? Is it having Parks not turn its back on its partnerships with schools? But we’re always talking about the next broken window, the next assault, the person who didn’t get into treatment. And we’re always talking about where the county has failed. And we’ve got to be able to get out of crisis to work on the next bigger thing.

Miller: Thirty seconds for this: How would you make siting decisions for things like a Bottle Drop or the next Safe Rest Village?

Zimmerman: I helped open up the TASS site. That’s the large mass encampment that everybody gave us a lot of heck for a couple of years ago … and now they’re all touting it, because it’s our most successful shelter. But the reason that that one is working with the neighborhoods over in Powell, is because we have the ironclad, sharpest-toothed good neighbor agreement in the city. I wrote it with those neighbors and with those neighborhoods. And it’s my policy that I’m working in the county that every social service that we site – Bottle Drops included – has a good neighbor agreement.

Miller: Eric Zimmerman, thanks very much.

Olivia Clark joins me now, a policy and legislative advocate. Same first question to you: What do you see as the biggest issue that the city and the district are facing?

Olivia Clark: The biggest issue is really homelessness and public safety, and they’re all wrapped together. You’ve already heard all about that. I think from my perspective, not only do we need a better continuum of options for homeless people, but we need to be stronger advocates, both with the county and also at the federal level. You know, Dave, the federal government spends something like 17% on healthcare of our GDP, less than 1% on housing. Housing is health care. We need to raise the federal percentage on housing. I would like to advocate for that at the federal level.

Miller: OK. But you’d be one vote, among 12, at the city. What would you want to do at the city level, aside from federal lobbying?

Clark: The county has all the money. We don’t have all the money. In fact, it’s not been that long that the city actually invested in homelessness, and it was declared a crisis in 2015. I think we need to work more closely with the county as a partner to site, to fund, and to run.

Miller: This question came from a listener online: “What do you think of Portland’s bicycle transportation infrastructure?”

Clark: [It] sucks.

Miller: What would you want to do about it?

Clark: Improve it.

Miller: In any specific ways?

Clark: I think we need to make it safer … and actually, potholes are part of the problem. I’m a cyclist, I’m a long distance cyclist. Potholes are bad for bikes. So we need to do both. But right now, I think we also need to really fill the potholes.

Miller: This question came also from a listener online: “I’m really leery of the ability,” they wrote, “of a large group of political novices to work together constructively to make decisions.

What experience can you point to, to demonstrate that you’re able to listen carefully, and compromise as needed to make decisions on our behalf?”

Clark: My entire career has been about partnerships, building partnerships, building relationships with people to get things done. In fact, I had to build a regional partnership with all kinds of people – Labor, business, Intel, Nike – to raise the money to build the Tilikum Bridge, which I did. So, I’m a person who can work across the aisle and actually get things done.

Miller: Eli G, asked online, “How can we make our district safer for all residents?” He wrote, “I’m thinking specifically about the gunshots I hear at night.’”

Clark: Well, that’s, that really touches me. Well, I think we’ve talked about public safety. We need to have a stronger public safety ecosystem that also includes efforts to reduce gun violence. I’m definitely an advocate for more police as well. I think just having a police presence is a deterrent to crime.

Miller: More sworn police officer positions, or filling the ones that are unfilled right now?

Clark: I would say both … definitely both.

Miller: “Portland needs many more affordable living units,” wrote one person, “How, specifically, will you find the money, land and political will?’”

Clark: Well, I think “political will” is really the issue. We have money and we can get more money. I think I mentioned the federal government, we need to go there. We used to have a public housing program, by the way. Ronald Reagan cut it all. We need to bring that back. And we need to have a certain segment of housing outside the market so it stays affordable over time. But I think there’s a lot of support, a lot of grassroots support in Portland for actually building more affordable housing.

Miller: Olivia Clark, thanks very much.

Clark: Thank you.

Miller: Chris Henry joins us now. He spent 35 years as a commercial driver in freight and construction. Good to have you here.

Chris Henry: Thank you.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest issues that the city and the district are facing?

Henry: Well, everyone’s brought it up. It’s homelessness. It’s also wraparound services for the homeless. But, on a bigger scale, everyone is discussing the budget and how do you get these things that you want? You want to house the homeless. I spent some time living in my car in 2023. I worked for Yellow Freight, as you said, for 20 years. And after 100 years, they closed their doors and laid 30,000 of us off – 22,000 of those, including myself, were Teamsters. So I have a perspective that’s a little different than most of the other candidates. I think there’s a candidate in District 3 who spent time … she was homeless, too. So my focus will be more on how we are going to get this funded. Because I want a “Housing First” model, like they’ve implemented in Salt Lake City.

When you have a key to actually a place to stay, a place to live, then you can look at things like, “How am I going to recover? How am I going to change my life?” – things like that. So if we were to get a public bank and implement a public bank, I think we can bring $100 million back, that we’re paying in interest and fees to Wall Street banks, and bring it back here to work within our communities. And put that back in our budgets working for here for Oregon instead of funding things like fossil fuel projects elsewhere, which does not agree with Oregon

people.

Miller: A member of the audience asked, “What can Portland do now to prepare for the next pandemic?”

Henry: I want to advocate for health care, getting more of a universal health care system.

Miller: What experience do you have building coalitions of the kind that would let you get six other people to vote for something?

Henry: I was born ninth of 12 children. I come from a very large family, but it’s also representative of the larger community. It’s a community itself. Within that family, we still had to get things done at the end of the day. We had to get the dishes done, the food made, all of that. But what’s more, I formed a union. I organized 300 truck drivers, four counties – Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside and San Diego.

Miller: Chris Henry, thanks very much.

Henry: Thank you.

Miller: Ben Hufford joins me now, he is an architect. Good to have you here. What do you see as the biggest issue the city and the district are facing?

Ben Hufford: Yeah, thanks for that. I am an architect. I’ve been here for 30 years, and I’ve built a bunch of restaurants and commercial spaces. I am called to this out of a real service for housing. We have a housing shortage in Portland that’s very, very serious, and it affects us in different ways. Many of us, including myself, have a 30-year mortgage at a pretty nice interest rate. And I look at the housing emergency that’s been in effect since 2015, and I say, “It’s not really my emergency.”

We do have an emergency. We have an emergency because anyone who’s paying rent is now paying $1,207 instead of $700. It affects us differently, but it is an emergency. So I am in this race specifically because of housing. I know quite a bit about permitting and about the obstacles that we have created towards creating housing. And without a healthy housing market, we are gonna push our most vulnerable people to the street. So all of these things are related – housing, homelessness and public safety.

Miller: In a recent poll by The Oregonian, 56% of Portland voters said they strongly or somewhat support stepped up law enforcement efforts to reduce unsheltered homelessness and to send to jail anyone caught repeatedly breaking anti-camping ordinances – 56% of Portlanders said that. Do you support that?

Hufford: The answer is “Yes, but ...” We have a lot of people who are doing really good work, from Sharon Meieran at the county down to Rose Haven in the city, who are helping people with day shelters. There are people who are really doing a great job trying to help people on the street. I am not a “bail the water out of the boat” sort of guy. I am a private architect who’s run a business here for 18 years, it was my own business. I’m a “fix the hole in the boat” guy. So I feel like we need to address the pressures on housing.

That being said, we need to tell people where they can go, not where they can’t go. And right now we just tell people where they can’t go. And sympathies for folks who are living in a tent. You don’t know what the rules are. You don’t know where you can go. You’re the mole in “Whack-a-mole.” So we really need to create those spaces where you can go. Now, that being said, there’s a variety of people who are on the street. There are folks who are on the street who only need a security deposit to get back in stable housing, and at the far other extreme – and I’ll try to be brief – there are people who are choosing to be there. And I think without the choice, without the tool of saying that the end result here, is a fine and ultimately jail. I would love to see that policy implemented and never used, because we have other options.

Miller: Ben Hufford, thanks very much.

Tony Morse joins me now, he is a recovery advocate. Good to have you here.

Tony Morse: Good to be here. Thank you.

Miller: What do you see as the biggest issues that the city and the district are facing?

Morse: The biggest issue we’re facing, both as a city and within District 4, is the addiction crisis. The addiction crisis impacts everything from public safety to housing and homelessness,

to livability and the reputation of our city. To put some numbers on this: Last year, Portland recorded over 300 overdose deaths. Every single one of those is preventable, and going forward we have to do more to stop them from happening. When first responders are busy responding to overdose calls, 911 becomes congested and they’re not able to respond to property crime calls or person-crime calls. We can free up the emergency response bandwidth by attacking this issue more aggressively.

From a systems change perspective, what we need to do is create a coordinated office of addiction response, where we have pieces of the city, the county and the state at a single table, working together with providers. It’s essential to get payers at the table. The CCO’s [Coordinated Care Organizations], like CareOregon, who are funding a very important program in Portland, CHAT, that lives in the Portland Fire Bureau – that’s Community Health Assess and Treatment. And we are going to get this up and off the ground by working collaboratively.

Miller: What are your qualifications for the role of this new job that you are running for?

Morse: Under this new system of government, Portland City Council is going to be a legislative body, and I have quite a bit of legislative experience. In fact, I think Olivia and I are the only ones with legislative experience who have worked in Salem, among the candidates tonight.

I was a lobbyist for Oregon Recovers during the 2023 legislative session. And if we don’t remember, that was the year of the longest walkout in Oregon history. One of the things I was able to do was to build broad support for the Fentanyl Education Bill, which now is getting life-saving education about fentanyl into Oregon classrooms. And I was able to get bipartisan support and get it to the floor quickly, where it passed with a vote of 59 to 0, and got to the governor’s desk before the walkout could have stopped it. And if I can get 59 Oregonians from across the state to agree on something like that, I can unite seven city councilors to pass policy.

Miller: How do you propose changing the narrative of the city … which in some ways is distinct from policies, distinct from reality?

Morse: It’s changing the narrative. We’re talking about storytelling on a national stage, right? And Portland needs some wins, and what that is going to look like is a combination of delivering some good outcomes. We’re gonna get overdose numbers down. We are going to revitalize downtown and start bringing in commercial tenants and businesses again. And we are going to promote the arts … and maybe major league baseball is part of the story. But what we are going to do is, we’re gonna stand up and form a collaborative government that can get things done and show the world that Portland’s on track for a comeback.

Miller: Tony Morse, thanks very much.

Miller: Before we go, we want to give you just a taste of one of the lightning rounds from the forum. These were a series of quick, often less serious questions intended to give voters a better sense for who these candidates are.

Miller: Fill in the blank: “I wish Portland were more …” And your name, first.

Zimmerman: It’s Eric Zimmerman. And I wish Portland were more safe.

Penkin: Stan Penkin. I wish Portland was more vibrant.

Weinstein: Bob Weinstein. I wish Portland was more thriving.

Clark: Olivia Clark. I wish it was more diverse.

Silkie: Sarah Silkie, I wish Portland were more green.

Hufford: Ben Hufford, architect. I wish Portland was more affordable.

Ross: Moses Ross. I wish Portland was more like Multnomah Village.

Henry: Chris Henry. I wish that Portland was, probably, a little more weird.

Freeman: Lisa Freeman. I wish Portland was better at assertive communication.

Green: Mitch Green. I wish Portland was more inclusive.

Morse: Tony Morse. I wish Portland was more housed.

Lykins: Chad Lykins. I wish Portland was more connected.

Arnold: Eli Arnold. I’m gonna go pragmatic.

Miller: What was your first job?

Zimmerman: I worked at TCBY, when they existed. Eric Zimmerman.

Penkin: Sweeping. Stan Penkin. Sweeping floors in my father’s cabinet shop.

Weinstein: Bob Weinstein. Working in my grandfather’s haberdashery operation.

Clark: Olivia Clark. Working in my father’s diner.

Silkie: Washing dishes for $3.35 an hour.

Miller: That was Sarah Silkie.

Hufford: Ben Hufford. I worked in childcare for kids that were 2 to 5 years old.

Ross: Moses Ross. I’ve worked two jobs: I worked at a bookmobile and I worked at a McDonald’s.

Henry: Chris Henry, working for my dad, moving furniture from when I was 12 ‘til I was 18. And then I said, “I’m not, I’m never gonna be a truck driver. Never, never, never.”

Freeman: Lisa Freeman. I was a T-Ball Coach.

Green: Mitch Green. I was a closer at Burgerville in high school.

Morse: Tony Morse. I was a lawn mower.

Arnold: Eli Arnold. Paperboy.

Lykins: Chad Lykins. When I was 15 years old, I got a job being paid under the table at a Laser Tag place called Q-Zar, with my best friend. And I worked from midnight till 6 a.m.

Miller: You have all been such good sports. Thank you very much.

Miller: That was from the District 4 Portland City Council candidate forum that we held last Thursday in Multnomah Village. We really want to thank John’s Marketplace for hosting us. And just a quick reminder if you haven’t yet mailed in or dropped off your ballot, you have until next Tuesday to do so.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.