For a transparent, resilient, and compassionate Fairview.

Fairview's public safety fee didn't come out of nowhere. Oregon's Measure 5 and Measure 50 cap how much a city can raise through property taxes, no matter how fast real costs grow. Meanwhile, Gresham proposed a 74 percent increase in fire service costs, from $4.75 million to $8.29 million annually across Fairview, Troutdale, and Wood Village, and the city hadn't built the reserves to absorb an increase like that without passing it directly to residents.

If left unaddressed, the next contract renewal, the next dispatch increase, will hit the same wall, and the likely response is another emergency fee rather than a plan. That's an unpredictable cost that lands hardest on residents living on fixed incomes, and it wears down trust in city government every time it happens without warning.

My plan has three parts. First, we need a real reserve policy with targets tied to projected cost growth, following the same standard the Government Finance Officers Association recommends, which is at least two months of operating expenditures held in reserve. Second, we need to move forward on a formal negotiating position alongside Troutdale and Wood Village when fire and police contracts come up, so the smaller cities aren't handed a number with no say in how it was set. An independent consultant already found the proposed increase lacked clear justification, and the three cities' own data showed response times averaging over 14 minutes, missing the national standard fire departments are measured against. Residents deserve to know they're not just paying more. They're not even guaranteed better service for it. And third, I would like to find ways to have regular public reporting on reserves and spending, so residents can track this before it becomes a crisis rather than react to it afterwards.

As I currently sit on Fairview's Budget Committee and have gone through the actual numbers, I have a better picture of the numbers we are facing and why we are in the situation we are in in the first place. And as a counselor, I'm use to translating complicated information into something people can actually act on.

This one starts from a real intersection I cross every day. There have been more than one close call at the light where Halsey crosses 223rd, and it isn't just a mere feeling for me. Halsey has a documented history of serious crashes in this corridor, including a head-on collision near 223rd that sent three people to the hospital. Multnomah County adopted a Vision Zero safety plan for East County after crashes killed 104 people and seriously injured 473 more between 2013 and 2022, with Fairview named as one of the partner cities.

My proposed fix for this issue comes from the evidence lines up with what my gut tells me. Research from the Federal Highway Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety on intersections converted to roundabouts shows crash reductions of roughly 40 to 48 percent overall, and 75 to 90 percent fewer of the crashes that cause serious injury or death, the exact kind of head-on and T-bone collisions a roundabout is specifically designed to prevent. I will be honest, two-lane roundabouts show smaller benefits than single-lane ones, and drivers unfamiliar with them take some time to adjust. Roundabouts are not the magic pill for every intersection, but they can be placed in areas evaluated to deal with dangerous stretches like the one at Halsey.

The longer vision for me is a Fairview designed around people first and where cars are for getting between cities rather than getting around inside one. Additionally I want the city to have a real plan to reduce how dependent it is on any single, volatile source of energy. Energy price shocks hit household and city budgets directly, the same way fire and dispatch cost increases already have, and I want Fairview to have more say over its own energy future the same way I want it to have more say in its fire and police contracts.

I'm be upfront with you with a disclaimer that I do not have any engineering credentials to traffic design or energy infrastructure. What I am bringing to the table is the same fiscal discipline as everything else on this page. Given where Fairview's finances stand today, this starts as planning work, identifying real problem locations, looking at what comparable small cities have done, and building the case to present to the community. The larger investments come once the city is actually out of its financial crisis and in a more sustainable position to spend responsibly. I'd rather tell you honestly where I want to take Fairview than pretend it's already funded.

East County has always had thinner homelessness services than central Portland, and it just got even thinner. Multnomah County eliminated its HOPE Team outreach program in the FY2027 budget. Fairview's very own mayor testified in person at the county's public budget hearing to keep it funded, and the cut happened anyway. This is a sobering reminder of how little weight East County carries at the county level on its own.

If Fairview doesn't respond to it's loss of the HOPE Team, the likely outcome is the worst of both worlds, residents in crisis with no real path to stability, and residents frustrated by an increase in visible homelessness. This dynamic will not solve anything long term. It just hardens a tribal us-versus-them dynamic while the underlying need keeps growing. Left unchecked, this trend show up later as higher emergency costs and an erosion of trust in local government.

My plan her starts with a Housing First approach as I mentioned earlier. Stable housing is the first step toward recovery, not something earned after other problems are solved. I want Fairview to build on its working relationship with the providers already active here, including Peer Company, and to build stronger connections with regional providers like ERGO and Cascadia. And I'd pursue a two-step approach at the city level. First with an audit of Fairview's own ordinances for unintended barriers, then a real feasibility study for what the city can responsibly build or fund on its own.

This isn't a position I arrived at from the casually. I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor, and I've testified before the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners against the HOPE Team cut. I understand both the clinical reality, that trauma and drug abuse is often a consequence of homelessness and not only a cause of it, and the practical governance tools a city actually has available to respond.