The 30 candidates running for City Council in Southeast Portland’s 3rd Ward include a teacher, a middle-aged father, a software engineer and a retiree.
The six most powerful candidates had similar key campaign promises, as measured by funds raised and support secured. “I will be cooperative and pragmatic and insist that the city do its job.”
“People are tired of blaming,” said Tiffany Koyama Lane, a third-grade teacher and union organizer. He currently leads the citywide field in funds raised by City Council candidates. “They really want the government to get it together.”
Koyama-Lane said her willingness to work with people she disagrees with will help create a city that works better and keeps its promises.
Nearly all of the seven District 3 candidates interviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive for this story cited the same top issues: homelessness, housing and public safety. Three people mentioned transportation, two people mentioned education, and two people talked about climate change mitigation. (Read the responses from all 22 District 3 City Council candidates who responded to policy questions sent to all City Council candidates by The Oregonian/OregonLive.)
Several candidates also pointed to specific city functions that they believe could be run more effectively. Examples include finding new locations for village-style homeless shelters (former City Councilman Steve Novick has proposed repurposing public golf courses) and non-Byzantine systems for community collections. such as the creation of Feedback to the station.
Portland City Council candidate Tiffany Koyama Lane is a public school teacher and union organizer who is endorsed by the Democratic Socialist Party of America and is a top fundraiser in the 3rd District. . Here she is pictured speaking at a candidate forum on October 2, 2024. Mark Graves/The Oregonian
When asked who in particular they were looking forward to working with, they all gave some diplomatic answers: Jesse Cornett. I don’t get to choose who the other two are, but I’m committed to working with them whoever they are. ”
District 3 encompasses much of Southeast Portland, extending roughly from Interstate 84 to the city’s southern border and from east of the Willamette River to Interstate 205. Eastmoreland and Eastmoreland are different. To see the new city council districts, be sure to use The Oregonian/OregonLive’s interactive map.
Ward 3 had the highest turnout (75%) of any ward in the city in fall 2020. According to city data, 74% of the voting-age population is white, second only to Ward 4 on the city’s west side, which is 76% white. Only 3% of District 3’s voting age population is black and 8% is Hispanic.
However, the average household income in District 3 is the second lowest of all districts, at approximately $83,000 per year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, four of the top six fundraisers in the 3rd District race are white men. But the two leaders are women of color. Koyama Lane raised more than $150,000 for the city game, while Angelita Morillo raised slightly less. Novick raised about $108,000.
Several other candidates, including pharmacist Sandeep Bali and Crystal Azul Otero, program manager for the county’s homeless services department, also come from racial and ethnic backgrounds different from the majority of Portland residents. He will bring in the perspective of a person with a personality.
Angelita, the second largest fundraiser and one of the youngest District 3 City Council candidates, at the Climate Justice Forum held at The Porch in Southeast Portland on October 2, 2024.・Mr. Morillo answers questions. Mark Graves/The Oregonian
Cornett, director of policy and advocacy for Oregon Recovery, which advocates for improved addiction treatment in the state, said the three-winner system seems to encourage everyone campaigning to show goodwill. spoke.
Voters can rank up to six City Council candidates, with the top three vote-getters winning each district’s seat. As part of the plan to move City Council elections in the future, winners of Wards 3 and 4 will only hold their seats for two years, after which they must run again.
Nancy Champlin, executive director of SE Uplift, a nonpartisan nonprofit designated by the city to connect the District’s neighborhoods with the City Council, is concerned with racial civility in the District and Portland’s He said he is hopeful about the new governance structure.
“We’re going to have a more representative democracy in Portland, and that’s great,” said Champlin, whose organization gets 92 percent of its budget from the city. “(Our) neighbors are going to be on the city council.”
Candidates who spoke to The Oregonian/OregonLive for this article universally derided the current structure of city government, which puts city council members in charge of each city department.
“I thought there were real problems with the old system of government that I served in,” said Novick, a lawyer and one of the veteran politicians on the 3rd District ticket. . Novick, 61, served as a City Council member in charge of the Portland Transit Authority from 2013 to 2017. Throughout that time, he said, he fought for money to repair roads and ultimately won voter support for a city gas tax.
Under the new system, each department would be overseen by a professional administrator, and city councilors would decide city-wide policy.
Portland City Council District 3 candidate Ahram Osman, an environmental and climate advocate, answers questions at a candidate forum for the November election. Mark Graves/The Oregonian
Daniel DeMello, a software engineer who serves full-time on the city council, received a recent settlement from a lawsuit he filed against Evergreen College in Washington for failing to release public records in a timely manner. Mainly making a living. He joined the Joint Office for Homeless Services Community Services Advisory Committee in December 2022, but was disappointed by the lack of clear answers to questions about the government’s budget.
“The first question I had was, ‘How much does it cost to run each shelter bed per day?’” recalls DeMello. “It took another six months before they got me an answer.”
DeMello has raised just over $47,000, but estimates he has spoken to 15,000 Portlanders.
Rex Burkholder, who served on the Metro Regional Council for 12 years, is also more focused on door-knocking than fundraising. He said he bikes three nights a week to different parts of the district, meeting people in their homes and learning what issues are important to them. Burkholder, the leader of a successful 2016 ballot measure that allotted state funds to public schools to provide students with a week of outdoor school, believes in building coalitions around common causes. He said he was good at it.
“Teamwork and cooperation are going to be very important” to successfully transition to a new government structure, he said. “I want this damn thing to work. And I don’t want it to take three years. I want you to get up and do it quickly.”
Portland City Council District 3 candidate Rex Burkholder, who is speaking at the Climate Justice Candidates Forum here, previously served as Metro Commissioner. Five other candidates and over 50 voters attended the candidate forum held at The Porch on October 2, 2024. Mark Graves/The Oregonian
Burkholder, 68, considers his age and experience an asset. The race also features several young candidates, including Ahlam K. Osman, 22, DeMello, 27, and fundraising expert Morillo, 28. Morillo is an alumnus of Emerge University of Oregon, which recruits female candidates for the Democratic Party.
“I’m excited to be working with people with so much experience,” Morillo said. “I don’t believe in generational wars. But I think we can bring a generation into government that we haven’t seen yet.”
Morillo is a lobbyist for Partners for Hunger Free Oregon, a local TikTok personality with more than 34,600 followers, and one of the most left-leaning candidates in the 3rd District race. She has support from the Working Families Party and Bernie PDX, and is one of two strong candidates without support from the city’s business sector.
While housing and homelessness are a top priority for Morillo, who said the Lincoln High School graduate was homeless for about a year while in college, she also thinks it’s time for the city to create a unified sanitation authority.
“Not only will the city be cleaner, but it will also be easier to access[sanitation services],” she says.
Koyama Lane is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and is one of two candidates for Portland City Council. She said it was difficult to participate with two elementary-age children at home, but the 2023 teacher strike showed her the power of collective action.
Currently, she said, when she calls the Sunnyside K-8 front office about classroom maintenance and cleanliness issues, she gets a response. “The level of taking these concerns seriously didn’t really exist before the strike,” Koyama-Lane said.
Several candidates are receiving support from across the political spectrum in Portland. For example, Cornett, policy director for Oregon Recovery, is a member of United for Portland, the political arm of the Portland Metro Chamber, and former City Council member and police accountability activist Jo Ann Hardesty. I am supported. And De Mello is backed by City Council member and mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez, known for supporting expansion of the city’s police force, and Run for Something, a national organization that recruits young progressive candidates. There is.
Many of the candidates in the 3rd District have few supporters and little money. Outside of the six leaders, Harrison Kass and Chris Flannery are notable for each raising more than $10,000 directly from more than 300 donors. Everyone else is far behind.
Community organizer and District 3 City Council candidate Chris Flannery takes questions during a candidate forum in early October 2024. Mark Graves/The Oregonian
For some, fundraising isn’t the goal. John Walker was second to last with just over $3,400 raised. But he hasn’t given up. Walker, a policy analyst with the Oregon Health Authority, said when the Portland Teachers Association falsely claimed the district was hiding funds during the 2023 strike, there was no response from elected city officials. He said he was running for office because he was appalled by this.
“No one stood up in the city, no one stood up in the county,” he said of the weeks-long strike that kept kindergarteners and 44,000 other students out of school for a month at the time. said. “You can’t have a city council member who isn’t proactive.”
The father-of-two said he was now about a third of his goal of speaking to 10,000 voters. A large banner hanging on the side of his Division Street fence proclaims Walker a “boring candidate.”
Walker said he still thinks he has a chance of winning, given the likelihood that someone ranked fourth or fifth by many voters will ultimately win a seat in Congress. His name was placed at the top of the ballot in District 3 by random drawing, coming in fifth place. And he had read that it would help him vote in nonpartisan elections.
“I think there’s a limit to what you can do with money if no one is paying that much attention to nonpartisan races,” he says.
Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian. If you have any tips or questions, please email lmhughes@oregonian.com. Or follow @lrmongeau on X.
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