Ward 3 hears from candidates Jennifer Smith, John Barofsky

Presenter: For the first time in a generation, Alan Zelenka is not running for the Eugene City Council. The two candidates seeking to succeed him in Ward 3 introduced themselves at the Amazon Neighborhood Association April 22. Jennifer Smith. 

Jennifer Smith: I’m Jennifer Smith. I am a union president and I am a progressive Democrat running for Eugene City Council, Ward 3. I work at the University of Oregon. I have worked there for almost 20 years. I was raised in Eugene, went to Edison Elementary School, graduated from South Eugene High School.

I have a master’s degree in transportation planning. I have a master’s degree in public administration and I’m the president of my union. More importantly, I’m the elected steward of my union, representing my nearly 1,800 colleagues at the University of Oregon. I am running on a platform of:

• Taking climate action to meet our community agreements around our climate goals. 
• Building affordable housing—we’re in a housing crisis.
• Protecting our quality of life, our social services, our community character, our safe public spaces. 

I was raised in Eugene. I went away to college. I came back 21 years ago to have a family. I have a son who also went to Edison Elementary School and also graduated from South Eugene High School.

So I am a daughter, I am a mother, and I’m a wife, and I’m a union president. So I have spent the last 20 years working to build collaboration amongst my colleagues, working with management to achieve the goals, to better serve our University of Oregon students. 

And I’ve also been spending time the last 20 years working on issues that are important to me around our climate goals, around active transportation, around protecting our vulnerable neighbors and around housing options.

I’ve served on committees at the city level, at the county level, at the state level, and at the transit level. I’ve worked on budget committees to make really tough decisions with limited resources. I’ve worked to build power amongst our immigrant community. Since 2010, I’ve worked with United for Immigrant Justice in Lane County to make sure that we have a safe and welcoming city for all.

I’ve worked on adopting missing middle housing, and I have particularly been interested in creating transportation options. I am, like I said, I’m a walker, I’m a biker, I’m a transit user. And so the built environment is very important to me—human-scale built environment, places where we can have the option to go car-free if we can and want to.

So building along transit corridors is very important to me. That’s an affordability issue. So people are not tied to their cars and meeting climate goals is very important.  

Also being welcoming to all income types in Eugene. So housing options of all spectrum is a priority of mine. I hope we can meet our climate goals around building community solar and battery storage, continuing our investment in our transportation infrastructure.

There are many opportunities that will arise at City Council and I want to be a progressive voice building collaboration amongst our neighbor members, our community, and be a vehicle to go from our community to our Council, back to our community, back to our Council.

And I will be someone who comes back continuously and engages transparently with my community on issues that are important to us to maintain our quality of life. I want my son to be able to have the same opportunities I had when I moved here. 

We need jobs, we need housing options. We need to build a climate-resilient future. And I care deeply about that. I care deeply about our culture and what makes us special and unique. And I pledge to protect what we love about Eugene and make it even better.

Presenter: John Barofsky:

John Barofsky: Some of you may know me better as Gianni from Beppe and Gianni’s restaurant, the Gianni half of that restaurant over on 19th and Agate.

I’ve lived in Eugene since 1982 and I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 23 years. I’ve been on the Fairmount Neighborhood Association for that full time. We’ve had a business in the community for 28 years, and I’ve been plugged in to our neighborhoods for that whole time.

Like I said, I was on the board when, as some of you know, if you come to these meetings and you raise your eyes when they say, ‘We’re looking for board members,’ you become a board member. That’s how I made my first step into public service. That led me into other ways to give back to my community.

So I applied for the Eugene’s Budget Committee and was on lucky enough to get appointed to that. I was on that for seven years. After that, I moved into the Planning Commission. I was on the Planning Commission for eight years.

And then after that I was lucky enough to get elected and these people to talk about all the good work that we’re doing at EWEB—right now I am the EWEB commissioner for Ward 2 and Ward 3. So I’ve been dealing with those issues for the last five years on your behalf. And there are some very challenging and rewarding types of issues that we’re dealing with.

Along with those, I’ve been on several other boards and commissions.

I’ve been on the Street Panel Review Board since its inception, so that’s a board where we make sure that the money on the bonds that we’ve voted for go and do what we have been doing. One of the things that we’ve done, luckily in each bond, that we’ve approved is we can improve the number of dollars that are going to our pipe to invest in type of infrastructure. It’s one of the only really buckets of money that we have to do some of those things, and so I’m proud of that.

I’ve also been on the Affordable Housing Trust Fund committee. Again, that’s one where we sit in and we help decide how we can spend the money that the city collects to help our affordable housing. Since that inception, we’ve added over 400 door fronts to this community.

I say these things, that I didn’t do those by myself. I sat in rooms and committees and helped guide those policies, and I never really thought about what am I achieving, I just did the work ’cause I wanted to do the work.

It wasn’t until I started running for City Council, people said, ‘What have you achieved?’ And I never even had that thought of what am I trying to achieve? I’m just trying to help give back to my community that has given me my family and my employees so much help.

So those are some of the things that I’ve been on. I’m also on the Community Safety Payroll Tax Advisory Committee. So a few years back, the city put a payroll tax to help fund some of our public safety needs. Those are police, but it’s also 911 officers, court people, ambulance transport, money for our youth and also for homeless people. And so those are things that I’ve been able to make sure that the money is being spent the way that it was put up to us when we decided, ‘Yes, we’re going to give a little bit more money.’

So of the issues that I’m really leading into is really housing and homelessness. I’ve been working with Mayor Kaarin Knudson, our mayor, on that for years, through Better Housing Together and other committees that I’ve been on. That’s one of the ones that’s important to me.

Second is public safety, and for me, public safety means more than just you and I who have a door that we can lock at night. It means all of our public spaces need to be safe for all of our communities, ’cause some of our most vulnerable people are the ones that are affected by our crime and our are being taken care of.

And then the third one is our city’s finances: Being able to make sure that we have good libraries, Police, Fire, all of those things are important.

My time on the Budget Committee has given me an insight into our city’s budget and being able to prioritize those things and making sure that we can fund what we all expect and want, and balancing those issues is going to be something that’s going to be complex moving forward. I think I’ve got the experience to do that.

I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’ve got the endorsement of our Mayor Kaarin Knudson, our Congresswoman Val Hoyle, and our former Congressman Peter DeFazio, and people who see what I’ve done and believe that I might be the right person. 

Presenter: The candidates were asked about affordable housing, and how the state’s push for greater housing density is playing out in Eugene. Jennifer Smith: 

Jennifer Smith: We need to preserve the affordable housing we have now. I am really concerned about, although our housing stock is aging, it does need to be maintained. But this is our affordable housing now. And I have concerns about developers having open season on our town.

We are in a housing crisis. We do need to build housing. But developers have one motive and that’s profit. And we have built a lot of community value through our decades of work on our community and our properties. And we’ve devoted our money, our talents, our energy toward, to creating a place that people want to be in.

I’m really concerned about developers wanting to cash in on the value that we’ve created. So I think community engagement is critical to the process of building affordable housing.

I am a transportation person. I think it’s very important that we build housing where people have the option to be without a car.

I think that’s affordable. I’m not convinced that all housing is equal. I’ve heard that market rate housing will trickle down and become affordable. I have some doubts about that. I’m not sure that the market is capable of taking care of our community the way that we are with our collective knowledge.

As I’ve been knocking on doors for this campaign. I’ve known this, but I’m really feeling it on a visceral level—this neighborhood is so much denser than it seems from the street.

It has a lot of ADUs. There are alley apartments. There’s a lot of people living here, and you don’t see it from the street. As a walker, I’m walking down the sidewalk and it feels like a neighborhood. It feels like a warm place to live. And a lot of people are living here, and I think that’s infill-compatible development done correctly, where the homes are comfortable to walk in and they’re built at a human scale.

So it’s challenging to build density. It can be done. I think that we have a lot of tools in the city. We can use incentives and disincentives. We can incentivize building smaller ADUs. We can incentivize building. I like California cottages. I like things that are smaller-square-foot and are street-focused.

We have tools in our toolkit and we need to deploy them. I also think that a recent initiative around climate-friendly areas is a really great idea. This is kind of a rebranding of 20-minute neighborhoods, downtown and lower Coburg Road, where there’ll be denser developments that are supported through transportation options and services located within walking distance. Maybe not your job, but maybe the dentist, the grocers and the child care.

So, it’s a complex issue. We do need more housing, but I think we need to have a community process to guide that properly and to protect what we love about our city.

Presenter: John Barofsky:

John Barofsky: How are we going to solve affordable housing? For me, there are options that are out there and for me, affordable means affordable at all different levels. I want the people that are struggling the most, that may be at 30% area median income, to have a place to sleep.

But I also want my employees to be able to live and work in Eugene. I want their children to be able to live and work in Eugene. So some of the things that I think we can get there with is, there is something that is a little bit contentious. It’s called MUPTE—multiunit property tax exemptions. And what that does is it gives a 10-year property tax exemption to people who are building housing.

And some people say that that’s just a giveaway to developers, but for me it’s, I’ve seen MUPTE houses and apartments get built, and for me, any doorfront that we can build in this community is a plus plus.

Some people say that it’s a negative that it’s developers taking money off the tax break, but we’ll get the money back and that piece of property would’ve been sitting not gaining any tax increments anyways.

So infill and these types of issues are affecting our neighborhood. The state mandated that middle housing needs to be allowed in all zones in our city. That was something that the state came down to us and said we had to do. I was on Planning Commission when those mandates came in to us. I worked through part of it and then I turned off of that, but I do understand the issue.

The city put into code and saw what the state said and said, ‘Okay, this is what we need to do.’ The state says it’s a law, we have to do it. We got nice pictures. This is what a 45-foot arch would look like and these things.

Right now we’re starting to see what is being built. You know, everybody knows the house on 21st and Alder, and that is an allowed use right now. I think now that as a city councilor, I would ask our Planning staff to go back and look and say, ‘Okay, this is what we thought we were going to get. This is what we’re getting. What can we do in our code that may help maintain our neighborhood’s character?’

I don’t know what it is, but I want to direct staff to say, ‘Let’s look at it. Did we get it right? And what can we do under the laws that have been mandated to us at that?’

That’s all I can say on that at this point, but I would like to look into that and see, because just because we’re densifying doesn’t mean it has to be something that disrupts the character of our neighborhood.

And I would do whatever I can to help not only have more places for people to live, but appropriately scaled to this neighborhood.

Presenter: After two high-profile motor vehicle accidents that killed a jogger and a bicyclist—within a few blocks of the candidate forum—the candidates were asked about transportation safety. Jennifer Smith:

Jennifer Smith: Well, Hilyard and Patterson, the length of them are incredibly dangerous streets. They are designed to be racetracks. They’re very low-visibility for pedestrians or people crossing. They’re impossible for bicyclists to access. They are not a modern street. They are not suitable for our community at all. So there do need to be some improvements.

I do not think the city of Eugene has the ability to go it alone, to reconstruct those streets, even though they’re desperately needed. These are projects that usually pull in funding from federal government, from the state government, and city government.

So I don’t think it is even possible to reconstruct those streets without assistance, although it is desperately needed and that is one of my main priorities—bicycle and pedestrian safety and infrastructure.

Presenter: John Barofsky:

John Barofsky: Yeah, these projects are very expensive. I’ll give you an example. At Amazon and 24th where that little new crossing is in there, that little raised thing—you have any idea how much that cost? $300,000.

Okay, and so asking, where can we get the monies from? I think advocating for maybe a larger street bond the next time it comes around and dedicating more of that to bicycle and pedestrian safety is something that I would lean into.

But these projects are very complicated and very expensive, but they’re very needed as well. So I think anything we can do, if it’s short-term little speed bumps that are plastic, I don’t know. I’m happy to look at any alternatives. But just know that they are very expensive and very complicated.

Presenter: Jennifer Smith and John Barofsky introduce themselves to voters in Ward 3 and respond to questions about housing and transportation planning.

Field recordings by Linda Duggan and Todd Boyle for KEPW 97.3 / Whole Community News. You can see the complete forum on Todd’s YouTube channel.