City Council Entrance Interview: Mike Marshall

Seeks to represent: District 2 (North/Northeast)

Pronouns: He/him

Job: Co-founder and executive director of Oregon Recovers

Fun fact: He and his husband adopted their two dogs from Project Pooch, a nonprofit that teaches teenage boys at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility how to train dogs.

A few weeks ago, Mike Marshall was pulling up to a red light at the intersection of East Burnside Street and 12th Avenue. He looked out the window of his car and saw a woman injecting drugs—meth, he assumed—into her neck.

“I couldn’t even look at it, as a former meth addict,” he tells WW. So he looked out the other side of the car to see a man injecting drugs into his arm.

“That could have been me,” he says. “I kind of feel like it’s almost a calling for me to bring my lived experience and policy experience to the city to make sure we start helping the folks who need help, the ones living on the streets, using drugs and alcohol.”

Since 2017, Marshall, 63, has been executive director of Oregon Recovers, a nonprofit he helped found that advocates to end the state’s addiction crisis. He’s been a policy advocate for over 30 years, with causes ranging from marriage equality to the restoration of Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. As a recovery advocate, he’s known for throwing sharp elbows—perhaps no single person is so strongly disliked by the alcohol industry.

Marshall has fans, too. He has received $40,000 in matching funds from the Small Donor Elections program, and his campaign has raised almost $44,000. He’s been endorsed by state Rep. Travis Nelson (D-Portland), Multnomah County Commissioners Julia Brim-Edwards and Sharon Meieran, and former Portland Mayor Sam Adams.

We spoke to Marshall about his campaign. Questions and answers have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: What are your top three priorities if elected?

Mike Marshall: The first thing I’ll work on is to ensure our new system of government is set up to succeed. I want to focus on building a robust legislative oversight process and a fully integrated constituent services system so that the goal of really reconnecting people to their elected government occurs. Secondly, I want to use my lived experience and policy expertise as a person in long-term recovery, and who’s been working on that issue for seven years, to slash Portland’s untreated addiction rate. My third priority is making our streets both safer and feel safer by hiring and training more cops. We need to look at our recruitment policies and make sure we’re hiring cops that embrace Portland’s progressive values and, ideally, who live in Portland.

Beyond policing, what measures would you take to improve public safety in Portland neighborhoods?

We have to deal with our untreated addiction crisis and address our homeless crisis. We need to have a plan to get 3,000 shelter beds up and running as quickly as possible. We need to focus on how we are deploying our existing law enforcement officers. Portland Street Response is a big part of safety, too. It’s wrong they can’t show up without cops first greenlighting them.

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

The city doesn’t have a coordinated approach. We rely entirely on the county to decide what we need, and they’re failing. We need sobering centers in every quadrant of the city so that it’s easier for a cop to drop someone off at a sobering center than it is to drop them off in a jail cell.

We need to triple our detox capacity and bring on 200 more detox beds so that we’re not turning 50% of the people away every morning at Hooper and Fora, the two detox facilities, and telling them to come back the next day. The city doesn’t pay for those services, but the city is impacted by the fact that we are not providing detox on demand. We need access to more long-term and residential treatment.

Do you support the city staying in the Joint Office of Homeless Services?

I absolutely do. We need more coordination, and there have to be concrete metrics. There has to be a sense of urgency. We should be looking at rapid solutions that perhaps require us to loosen zoning requirements or building requirements. We need to be hustling. We need to meet the moment. The culture, both within the county, arguably, and in city government, as well as in the Joint Office, is to not think big and not move fast, and it’s why people are increasingly disillusioned with every level of government.

Which current City Council members do you and your policies most align with?

You’re asking me to choose among friends. I think Dan Ryan’s willingness to defy the political winds to get more shelters built and to strengthen the arts community best reflects my current approach to this, which is we just need to get shit done, and we have to recognize that perfection can’t be the enemy of the good.

See the other Portland City Council Candidates here!