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.

Left unaddressed, this isn't a one-time problem. 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, a real reserve policy with targets tied to projected cost growth, following the same standard the Government Finance Officers Association recommends: at least two months of operating expenditures held in reserve, not assembled after the fact once a shortfall is already public. Second, 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. Third, regular public reporting on reserves and spending, so residents can track this before it becomes a crisis rather than after.

I bring this from the inside, not the outside. I sit on Fairview's Budget Committee and have gone through the actual numbers, not just the headlines. And as a counselor, translating complicated information into something people can actually act on is a skill I use every day, not a talking point.

This one starts from a real intersection, not a talking point. I've had a close call myself at the light where Halsey crosses 223rd, and it isn't just a feeling: 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.

On the fix, the evidence lines up with the instinct. 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. The honest caveat: two-lane roundabouts show smaller benefits than single-lane ones, and drivers unfamiliar with them take some time to adjust. This isn't a claim that a roundabout is the answer everywhere. It's a case for evaluating one at specific, dangerous stretches like this.

The longer view is a Fairview designed around people first, where cars are for getting between cities rather than required for getting around inside one, and where the city has a real plan to reduce how dependent it is on any single, volatile source of energy. That's not only an environmental position. 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'll be straightforward here: I'm not bringing engineering credentials to traffic design or energy infrastructure. What I bring is the same fiscal discipline as everything else on this page. Given where Fairview's finances stand today, this starts as planning work, not capital spending: identifying real problem locations, looking at what comparable small cities have done, and building the case. The larger investments come once the city is actually out of its financial crisis and in a 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 thinner. Multnomah County eliminated its HOPE Team outreach program in the FY2027 budget. Fairview's own mayor testified in person at the county's public budget hearing to keep it funded, and the cut happened anyway, a reminder of how little weight East County carries at the county level on its own.

If Fairview doesn't respond, the likely outcome is the worst of both worlds: residents in crisis with no real path to stability, and residents frustrated by visible homelessness with no city plan beyond enforcement. That dynamic doesn't solve anything. It just hardens an us-versus-them attitude while the underlying need keeps growing, and it tends to show up later as higher emergency costs and less trust in local government.

My plan starts with a Housing First approach: stable housing as the first step toward recovery, not something earned after other problems are solved. I've already drafted a concept paper along these lines, along with a neutral site-screening framework for city staff to use if new services are ever proposed locally. 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 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 outside. 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 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.