City Council Entrance Interview: Steve Novick

Seeks to represent: District 3 (Southeast)

Age: 61

Pronouns: He/him

Job: Environmental lawyer for the state justice department

Fun fact: He makes really good chocolate chip cookies.

Steve Novick has already served four years on the Portland City Council (from 2013 to 2017), but he says he still has things to accomplish. As will surprise no one who observed his eventful council term, not long after Novick left office, he began to hatch new ideas.

“What occurred to me in 2018 was, ‘Wait a minute, cities buy a lot of guns,’” he says.

Novick wants Portland to help reduce teenage suicides by using “smart guns,” which use biometric technology like fingerprints so that only the owner of the gun can fire it. He would arm the Portland Police Bureau with smart guns, spurring gun manufacturers to produce more of them and make them generally available to the public.

“Over time, [people would] start replacing dumb guns in people’s homes,” he says. “Then kids with mental health issues would not have access to a gun.”

While Novick grew up in Cottage Grove, the first time he really spent time in Portland was when he was working as an environmental lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice and sued the city for violating the Clean Water Act. He’s been living here for 28 years.

While on the City Council, he championed a 10-cent gas tax that helped fund street repairs and safety improvements, but the fraught debate left him vulnerable to an election upset by former Commissioner Chloe Eudaly.

In his quest to return, Novick has raised almost $107,000 and qualified for $40,000 in matched funds through the Small Donor Elections program. He’s been endorsed by AFSCME Local 189, LiUNA Local 737, IBEW Local 48, the Portland Fire Fighters’ Association, Portland Police Association, and Northwest Oregon Labor Council. He’s also been endorsed by Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, former Governor Kate Brown, and former City Commissioners Dan Saltzman, Chloe Eudaly, and Mike Lindberg.

We spoke to Novick about his campaign. The conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

WW: What are your top three priorities if elected?

Steve Novick: I have an overarching priority of trying to make sure we spend public money as effectively as possible on the priority issues. The highest priority is getting folks off the street and into humane forms of shelter, like the tiny house villages, until we have the housing supply to get everybody into permanent housing. Another priority is public safety—reducing both crime and the fear of crime but also literally making the streets safer by reducing the number of traffic crashes. A third thing is making sure we do our part to reduce carbon emissions and help low-income people and people of color deal with the impact of climate change, which is what the Clean Energy Fund was designed to do.

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

We need to have addiction treatment more widely available. Ultimately, not only will it reduce the toll taken by addiction directly but it will also reduce the amount of crime. And by addiction, I include alcohol. One thing the city can do in terms of reducing traffic deaths and injuries is invest in making streets safer—putting in more flashing beacons, adding sidewalks, etc. Somehow, during the pandemic, drivers went crazy. And they’ve stayed crazy since the pandemic’s been over. The most dangerous way to be a crazy driver is to speed—speed kills. There is an effective way to prevent speeding, and it’s speed cameras, but we only have them in a couple dozen places around the city. Frankly, I would like to have enough of them that people in the city realize that if they speed, they have a darn good chance of getting caught.

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

A pilot is going on within the fire bureau that’s funded by a grant from CareOregon. It was recently expanded beyond downtown to East Portland, where there are situations of overdose. They administer Narcan but then they offer buprenorphine, an addiction treatment drug, and then they try to get people to take advantage of services, and then weeks later, they’ll follow up to see if they did take advantage of addiction services. It would be great if that became the standard—that every interaction the city had with an overdose turned into an opportunity for people to get into drug treatment.

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

I think the city should stay. But I think it should use the possibility of withdrawal as a spur if it thinks the county is not spending the money wisely. We are not going to solve homelessness in the next few years, because it is largely a function of the spectacular housing shortage we have here.

One barrier to dramatically expanding is that it’s hard to find sites for those villages. If it’s a priority, why not professionalize it? Hire a staff of people that their job is to identify sites. I’m going to say something potentially dangerous: One thing I would ask the professionals to do is take a look at some rather large plots of land the city owns that are called golf courses. I realize that golf isn’t just for rich people anymore, but we do not have a golf crisis in the city. We have a homelessness crisis. And if, since land is hard to find, if you have big plots of land, you should at least study whether they’re part of the solution.

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

Carmen Rubio. Has anybody not said that?

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

The Clean Energy Fund should spend money as effectively as possible to reduce carbon emissions and help low-income people and people of color. Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions, and it’s becoming a larger and larger share of emissions. As utilities move toward renewables, electric utilities and transportation are a huge expense for low-income people. Right now there’s an application in front of the Clean Energy Fund to put some tens of billions of dollars up as a local match for the proposed 82nd Avenue rapid transit bus line that I think is an ideal example of something the Clean Energy Fund should be investing in.

In some cases, it might even make sense to tell people to buy electric cars, which are a lot cheaper to operate than gas cars. That might sound extravagant, but right now to retrofit homes to make them more energy efficient, the Clean Energy Fund is spending $46,000 per home. You could buy a three-year-old electric car and a charging station for half that.

This story has been updated to clarify Novick’s argument for purchasing smart guns.

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