City Council Entrance Interview: Elana Pirtle-Guiney

Seeks to represent: District 2 (Northeast Portland)

Age: 39

Job: Policy consultant at Confluence Solutions

Fun fact: She recently won second place for brownies she entered in an Oregon State Fair baking contest.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney is making her first bid for public office, but she’s no stranger to political work in Oregon.

In 2022, she led Lift Every Voice Oregon, the advocacy coalition that successfully backed Measure 114, which expanded the permits and background checks required to buy a gun and limited the capacity of ammunition magazines. (It’s still tied up in court challenges.)

She was an adviser to the commissioner for the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries for little less than a year leading up to 2022. Before that, she was a policy adviser and then legislative director to Gov. Kate Brown for six years.

Prior to joining Brown’s staff, Pirtle-Guiney spent nine years at Oregon AFL-CIO, where she was legislative and communications director.

“We have immense challenges in Portland right now,” Pirtle-Guiney tells WW. “But with that comes incredible opportunity.”

Pirtle-Guiney took a liking to Portland when she moved at age 17 to attend Lewis & Clark College to study international affairs. She’s been here ever since. With the new change in city government, Pirtle-Guiney wants to use her experience in policy to take advantage of the opportunities.

“This first City Council is going to have to weigh all of the opportunities for what the work of council is in Portland, and what they set up will, frankly, set the tone for how council works for probably the next 10 or 20 years,” she says. “I want to make sure that’s done well.”

Pirtle-Guiney has received $40,000 in matching taxpayer funds from the Small Donors Election program. In total, her campaign has raised just under $30,000. She’s received endorsements from Gov. Brown, state Sens. Michael Dembrow and Elizabeth Steiner, and the Northwest Oregon Labor Council.

We talked to Pirtle-Guiney about why she’s running for City Council. Her responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: What are your top three priorities if elected?

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Everything I want to work on boils down to three big categories: affordability, livability and effective government. It all needs to happen through the lens of what we’re doing to make Portland more responsive to Portlanders. Is this new form of government getting results for people? What are we doing to make this a city that people want to live in—addressing our homelessness and housing affordability and public safety concerns? How are we making sure that in every decision we make, we are paying attention to who benefits and who pays the cost for those decisions?

What aspects of the city’s current approach to drug use and overdose deaths do you support and what would you change?

We have to make sure that we have treatment beds available when somebody is looking for treatment. If somebody says that they are ready to go into recovery, and we say, “Great, we will have a spot for you a week from now,” that’s not getting somebody into recovery. We need to boost our infrastructure to actually get folks into recovery. We need to have sobering centers immediately.

Do you support the city staying in the Joint Office of Homeless Services? What’s your plan to address homelessness?

I do support the city staying in the Joint Office. As we’ve seen over the last couple of years, the city and the county being on different pages isn’t good for folks who are homeless. The Joint Office is the place where we can work out those differences and make sure that we are working together on a path moving forward.

Would you change the Portland Clean Energy Fund and, if so, how?

PCEF is the biggest strategic opportunity that Portland has right now. We have the ability to build ourselves up as a vibrant green city with good jobs while pursuing economic justice work because of PCEF. And I would like to see us lean into big projects that can create large-scale improvements in the lives of Portlanders through the opportunities that PCEF presents. I think there are a number of opportunities for funding energy efficiency in schools.

Which current City Council member do you and your policies most align with? Please specify just one.

When I look at who on the current council can help create a long-term vision for our city, who is passing policies with an eye toward where we are trying to get 10 or 20 years from now, I think Carmen Rubio is doing that more than anybody else on council right now.

How do you want police to respond to riots in November if Trump wins?

I think that when we assume that a rally or a protest will be a riot, we set ourselves up for a violent response. The first thing that we need to do to prepare for any sort of rally or protest is to prepare for a peaceful response to make sure that we don’t have law enforcement inadvertently escalating interactions between protesters and police. If you have protests and law enforcement shows up in riot gear, that escalates everything—and that’s not safe for anyone.

We need to make sure that there are plans in place for counterprotests, which will certainly happen. Police need to be ready to keep counterprotesters and protesters separate. If they need extra training for that, that’s what I want to focus on. I’d also ask for a hearing to have experts talk about rallies that have been handled in a way where everyone felt there was a good resolution.

See the other Portland City Council Candidates here!