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Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Dan Ryan
Michelle DePass
District 2 covers all of North Portland and much of Northeast, reaching its eastern edge just before Portland International Airport. This district includes the city’s highest concentration of historically Black neighborhoods, including Albina, which was razed during the construction of Interstate 5 in the 1960s.
Three seats are up for grabs in this district. Of the 22 candidates seeking them, 17 received public funding, a signal of broad support. Voters can rank up to six. We recommend the following choices, in descending order.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney snagged our No. 1 spot here. That’s largely because she’s spent years observing Oregon’s problems from all angles. Pirtle-Guiney, 39, spent six years as Gov. Kate Brown’s legislative director and policy adviser. Prior to that, she worked for nine years as the communications and legislative director at Oregon AFL-CIO, one of the biggest labor federations in the state. She hung out her own shingle to start a small consulting firm, Confluence Solutions.
We took note of Pirtle-Guiney’s endorsements from business, labor and progressive groups. Normally when we see such broad support, it means the candidate waffles more than a Shilo Inn buffet. But Pirtle-Guiney got those nods because she showed an ability to think about the city’s most complex issues as just that: complex. She can hold two concepts at once: that the city should remain in the Joint Office of Homeless Services instead of rashly pulling out, and that the Joint Office needs a by-name tracking list of people seeking its services. And we appreciate her focus on ensuring the new form of government starts clean out of the blocks. While it’s easy to focus on the crisis of the moment—homelessness is Portlanders’ top concern right now, polling consistently shows—Pirtle-Guiney convinced us she will be a steady guiding hand for the entirely new council.
City Commissioner Dan Ryan has served four years on the City Council, and during that time emerged as the foremost champion of tiny pod villages as a way to respond to unsheltered homelessness. Despite the haters, the villages seem to be working pretty well. We’re also struck by the comparative quiet and grace Ryan has shown after his home was targeted by political vandals—it stands in contrast to the grousing of Rene Gonzalez.
We remain concerned that Ryan, 62, is too easy a mark for downtown property owners, but we also think it’s wise to have some continuity from the old City Council to the new one (especially since we’re recommending a political neophyte for mayor). Ryan can be sharp-tongued and difficult to work with, and he doesn’t easily let go of grudges, but his results have proven worth the hard feelings he produces.
Michelle DePass also has a long history of public service. She’s worked at the city of Portland—in the parks, housing and sustainability bureaus—since the mid-1990s, with several breaks between policy roles. DePass, 63, has also served on the Portland Public Schools Board since 2019, first as chair and now as vice chair. She led the board during COVID-19 school shutdowns and in 2020 pushed the board to end its practice of electing board chairs behind closed doors. DePass has deep roots in the district, where she grew up and raised two sons. While we’re not confident DePass would be an especially strong policymaker, she’s put in her time as a public servant. That says something about her devotion to this city.
That’s three—the total number of seats available. But voters can rank another three candidates, and we suggest they do so as follows.
James Armstrong is a forensic accountant and the co-owner of three eye care clinics in North Portland with his wife, an optometrist. He impressed us with his business acumen but also his ability to shift his perspective when met with pushback. He says he recently reached out to a county commissioner about a shelter issue in St. Johns and learned that the county, in fact, wasn’t the primary provider of behavioral health services. The county’s contractors were. From there, Armstrong says, he developed a constructive relationship with Do Good Multnomah, the nonprofit contractor that runs shelters across the city. That thoughtfulness, combined with an insistence that Portland must be cleaner and more orderly, convinced us he’s an outsider who would be valuable in government.
Mike Marshall is the tireless, bulldog executive director of Oregon Recovers, an advocacy group that lobbies for sobriety. He was outspoken about the downsides of Measure 110—even before voters passed it. Marshall, 63, who’s in long-term recovery himself, is blunt and gives honest appraisals about the city’s and county’s repeated failures to combat homelessness and drug addiction. (He also repeatedly self-sabotages with unwise remarks.) We like that he wouldn’t shy away from a fight, and believe he’d continue to throw stones at government failures from the inside.
Mariah Hudson is a longtime communications official for Oregon Health & Science University. She garnered endorsements from business and labor groups, suggesting she can move fluently between oppositional parties. Hudson also served as board chair for the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods from 2016 to 2020. In our endorsement interview, Hudson, 46, came off as polished but predictable. We think Hudson would be even-handed on the council but are concerned about her ability to act independently of her political base.
Tiffani Penson, who works at the city of Portland as its people and culture manager, almost made our list. She correctly criticizes the city’s inability to provide basic services for Portlanders, but she didn’t offer a clear vision for what she’d do on the council. Similarly, Debbie Kitchin has spent years in the private construction sector and has long been a well-regarded figure in the business community. As a member of the Charter Commission that created this new form of government, Kitchin has demonstrated her civic spirit. But we left our endorsement interview feeling uninspired by her answers. Nat West, the founder of Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider, offers an interesting perspective, but his policy prescriptions didn’t stand out.
What Pirtle-Guiney, Ryan and DePass were known for in high school: Pirtle-Guiney was the “organized over-achiever.” Ryan was a stellar disco dancer. DePass was co-captain of the co-ed soccer team with Oregonian editor Therese Bottomly.