City Council Entrance Interview: Nat West

Seeks to represent: District 2 (North/Northeast)

Pronouns: He/him

Job: Founder of Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider

Fun fact: When he started Reverend Nat’s, there was no Angry Orchard.

Nat West spent the past 12 years running his cider business, Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider, which he started in an old house he and his wife bought in the Woodlawn neighborhood. After he closed the business in late 2023, he became a bus driver for TriMet.

“I drove 29 different routes over my time at TriMet,” he tells WW. “I loved seeing different parts of the city. I loved seeing so many different kinds of Portlanders ride the bus.”

West, 47, is now running to represent District 2. He says he wants to use his can-do attitude acquired from running a small business to tackle the issues he saw while driving his bus routes—from public drug use to unsafe road design for cyclists.

“Some people may say that addiction services isn’t really the city’s job,” he says, “but one thing that I learned as a small-business owner is that I don’t ever point fingers or wait for somebody else to do their job.”

West has received $40,000 in matching funds from the Small Donor Elections program. His campaign has raised a little over $71,000. He’s been endorsed by a slew of unions including American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 189, Service International Employees Union, and United Food & Commercial Workers Local 555. He’s also been endorsed by Metro Councilor Duncan Hwang, former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, and Willamette River access activist Willie Levenson.

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

WW: What are your top three priorities if elected?

Nat West: My biggest priority is economic development. I ran Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider for 12 years. Small businesses, particularly the food and beverage industry, are the soul of Portland. We’ve created this international reputation as a great small-business community but the city of Portland has never really supported us. The second priority is transportation. There’s so much room for improvement in how we design our streets to make them safer for everyone, no matter how you get around. My last priority is sort of a meta-priority—it’s setting up a high-functioning council right away. It doesn’t matter what our ideas are if we can’t get anything done, and the charter reform was pretty light on details.

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

I’m a big fan of Portland Street Response. I’m also a fan of Multnomah County’s Project Respond and Portland Fire & Rescue’s Community Health Assess and Treat program. I’d like to work towards setting up some more certainty about when a 911 dispatcher should send each one of those and look to possibly combine or expand the scope of their responsibilities with the goal of sending fewer armed police officers to calls.

When I think about neighborhood safety, I think about car traffic. Traffic deaths are way up, and we seem to not be working towards Vision Zero in any meaningful way. So when a pedestrian is hit by a car, I’d like to close that intersection until we can improve the safety for all road users.

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

We need a deflection center as soon as possible. We need open beds for when people are ready to begin recovery. We need more housing support for people who are experiencing homelessness, because the lack of housing is a major contributing factor to drug use. We learned a lot in the rollout of Measure 110. We were sold one coin with two sides, decriminalization and addictive recovery services, and we got one and not the other, and that’s doomed to fail. I am OK with the rollback of 110 because we didn’t get both things.

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

I think that we should pick on the Joint Office as much as we pick on any bureau. Are we getting the most out of our tax dollars? Unfortunately, when the Joint Office was set up, it was set up just with a transition of money from the city to the county, and there weren’t any metrics for success or requirements for continuing the funding. We should stay in the relationship, but we need to tie the dollars that are moving to the goal of moving people off the streets into housing.

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

At Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider, I spent three years locked in permit hell. I’m really glad that Carmen Rubio was able to finally bring all of the building development permits together in the new combined permitting bureau. I am looking forward to working with her to make sure that the new permitting bureau is meeting the needs of the city.

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

I hate seeing local businesses being damaged and my friends losing customers because of protests or riots, but also because of the media narrative around protests just sucking up all the oxygen about what Portland is. I would ask protesters to determine their goals ahead of time and work towards those goals, and provided that we aren’t hurting each other, I expect the police to stay out of the way.

How do you feel about the new structure of city government and ranked-choice voting?

Every other city our size uses this sort of council administrative structure, so I’m glad that we’re moving into the 21st century. Looking at ranked choice, I think it’s pretty simple for voters. You rank who you want in the order that you want. It’s probably more complicated now than it’ll ever be since there are so many candidates running. But fundamentally, I think this is a great system, and I’m confident the voters will be able to navigate the ballot.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Nat West ran his hard cider company out of a house for 12 years. That is incorrect, he moved to a commercial space after a year. The previous version of this story also stated West was a TriMet bus driver before starting his hard cider company. That is incorrect, he was a TriMet after closing his company. WW regrets the errors.

See the other Portland City Council Candidates here!