Commissioner District 1

Meghan Moyer

Voters in Multnomah County District 1—which covers neighborhoods west of the Willamette River and Southeast Portland west of Cesár E. Chávez Boulevard—are lucky to have two solid candidates running to represent them: Meghan Moyer and Vadim Mozyrsky. Both are thoughtful policy wonks who are clearly committed to making the county better, and neither is happy with the board’s leadership right now, a key qualification for us (much more on this in our District 2 endorsement).

Mozyrsky, 52, is an administrative law judge for the Social Security Administration whose family emigrated from Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. He ran for City Council against Jo Ann Hardesty and Rene Gonzalez in 2022 but lost in the primary.

Mozyrsky would likely make a solid county commissioner, especially as a replacement for the independent-minded Sharon Meieran, whose district this is now. But to win our endorsement, he’d have to impress us more than Moyer, 44, the director of public policy at Disability Rights Oregon. Before taking that job, she ran her own construction firm, and before that, she worked for a bigger firm, Skanska.

Right now, it’s relatively easy to win votes by talking tough on crime and demonizing people living in tents. What’s harder is sticking by the idealism and compassion that defined Portland before the pandemic and fentanyl hammered downtown.

Like Mozyrsky, Moyer isn’t thrilled with the state of Multnomah County. But she’s not afraid to defend solutions that require patience, as long-lasting solutions often do. And she calls out the ones she thinks are gimmicks.

Case in point: Mozyrsky touts his involvement in a federal class action lawsuit brought in September 2022 by a group of disabled people who argued that tents blocked their use of city sidewalks, a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The group went to Disability Rights Oregon for help with the suit, Mozyrsky says, but DRO balked.

Confronted with that fact at a City Club debate last month, Moyer could have dodged. She could have said it was her organization that made the call, not her. But she didn’t. She gave a full-throated, passionate defense of DRO’s decision.

“Absolutely, our sidewalks need to be cleared,” Moyer said. “But where in that lawsuit did it talk about electric scooters? Where in that lawsuit did it talk about Amazon deliveries being stacked on sidewalks? All of it was targeted at other people with disabilities in a gross, cynical use of the ADA. If this is what advocacy for people with disabilities looks like, I’m proud that I had no part in that.”

That’s a bold statement for a politician trying to win votes from people who are sick of tents and tarps. We’re betting that Moyer will bring that kind of passion and candor to a chamber that’s in desperate need of it.

What Moyer was known for in high school: She was voted “best sense of humor” and “most opinionated.”

Commissioner District 2

Sam Adams

Multnomah County government is in need of a serious remodel, down to the studs. That means bashing out some of the old walls and fixtures.

The right tool for the job is Sam Adams.

In the May primary, we washed our hands of Adams, 61, and endorsed his opponent, Shannon Singleton, 47, a capable advocate for the impoverished who would likely make a useful addition to a well-run government body. We chose her in part because a majority among us couldn’t imagine giving Adams a third crack at power after his first stint ended in scandal and his second in strife.

Adams served one term as mayor, but a sexual relationship with a teenager forestalled his reelection. He returned to government in 2021 as an aide to Mayor Ted Wheeler, in charge of taming the mayhem that had consumed Portland. The two parted ways under strain two years later amid complaints Adams had bullied female staff in the City Attorney’s Office.

We won’t attempt to vouch for Adams’ character. We can’t assure voters that a third act will redeem Adams, who glosses his behavior by noting that he left the mayor’s office with a 54% approval rating. “I don’t get up in the morning to make people mad,” he says.

But our county government needs an unflinching reformer. It’s a dysfunctional fiefdom run by an ineffective leader with near complete power. Its four commissioners are ruled by Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, who alone determines what items make the agenda each week. She spent more than a year trying to speed up slow ambulances, then adopted a plan that a colleague had been pushing for months. And commissioners regularly complain about getting meeting materials just minutes before they gather to deliberate on them.

Vega Pederson’s bureaucracy has been slow to deploy the hundreds of millions collected from taxpayers to pay for homeless services and her signature creation, Preschool for All. Most recently, she led a monthslong effort to create a deflection center where people arrested for drug possession could avoid jail by opting for treatment. It’s a noble endeavor, but Vega Pederson hatched the plan behind closed doors, keeping her own commissioners in the dark and irking neighbors.

The only way to blunt the power of the chair is to have a majority on the board that votes together. For years, sadly, Vega Pederson, and Deborah Kafoury before her, isolated dissenters like Meieran and rendered them powerless.

The last thing Multnomah County needs is another apparatchik like Commissioner Lori Stegmann who won’t buck Vega Pederson no matter how bad things get.

Watching Singleton’s campaign during the past few months hasn’t assured us she would show the independence this moment requires. She’s cut from cloth that matches Vega Pederson’s. We worry that she’s steeped in the social services, nonprofit mindset that has made the county too tolerant of wretched tent camps.

Singleton bailed on a golden opportunity to change the way the county and city handle homelessness in November 2022, when she stepped down as interim director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services after just six months on the job.

She could have pursued the permanent position but chose not to because reporting to multiple bosses (the mayor and the county chair) made it hard to move forward with initiatives she favored, she told us.

“I learned that I’m not the best at being a bureaucrat,” Singleton said in the endorsement interview. “I much prefer to cut through red tape, and I found it really difficult to do so.”

After watching Meieran and Julia Brim-Edwards clash with Vega Pederson and her department heads this year, we’re pretty sure that cutting red tape is even tougher as a legislator, which is what commissioners are, than as an executive running an agency.

Adams, on the other hand, appears obsessed with cutting red tape and just about anything else. He has been blunt in his criticism of Vega Pederson and clear about how he would oppose her worst instincts. He even commissioned a legal opinion from the Stoel Rives firm showing that the executive order Vega Pederson put in place at the beginning of her term to control the county agenda flies in the face of its charter. Say what you will about Adams, but he does his homework.

Our reversal here is less a celebration of Adams than an indictment of Vega Pederson, who has hoarded power only to misuse it. To correct that, we’re willing to let an imperfect technocrat with a mean streak back into government.

Go ahead, call us crazy. Call us tolerant of terrible behavior. But don’t call us willing to accept more of a government that is failing its citizens.

What Adams was known for in high school: He was voted “most flirtatious.”