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Steve Novick
Philippe Knab
Cristal Azul Otero
This district is the bleeding heart of liberal Portland. Places don’t get bluer than the neighborhoods running from the Hawthorne District to Mount Tabor.
The 22 candidates seeking three seats here will hold them for only two years, instead of four-year terms as in Districts 1 and 2. That’s because the Charter Commission wanted to stagger election cycles. When these seats are up for reelection in 2026, those winners will serve four years.
Ten candidates have qualified for public funding, a sign they’ve built a base. We recommend the following selections.
Our top choice is bidding for a return to City Hall. Steve Novick served on the Portland City Council from 2013 to 2017, losing his reelection campaign to bookstore owner Chloe Eudaly. During his four-year term, Novick was known for the hook he has for a left hand, his wit and his sometimes combative approach to policymaking. He did what once seemed impossible: erecting a fence along the Vista Bridge to reduce suicides (it worked). He was also a critical player in allowing Uber to operate in the city after he initially fought it—a capitulation he now regrets. His political fortunes foundered on his 2014 attempt to tax businesses to repair city streets, a fight for which he looks more prescient the more our pavement crumbles.
Time has mellowed Novick, 61. He’s still a staunch progressive, but Novick acknowledges that local officials in recent years have been ineffectual in stemming the tide of homelessness and drug use, and he rightly criticizes them for it. In an election cycle in which the talking points are cookie-cutter, Novick offered a longer list of inventive policy ideas—smart guns for cops, tiny homes on golf courses—than all the other candidates in this district combined. The role of legislator, without the burden of bureau management, will suit him. We’re grateful he’s back.
We’re taking a bigger chance on Philippe Knab, a lawyer who runs Washington state’s Right to Counsel program, which offers free legal aid to low-income tenants. Knab, 45, also oversees several other legal aid programs across the Columbia River and, prior to that, worked as a civil rights prosecutor for the New York City Commission on Human Rights and as a public defender in the Bronx. Knab didn’t qualify for matching taxpayer funds and has very little name recognition. But the political outsider impressed us in our endorsement interview in much the same way James Armstrong in District 2 did: Both men departed from simplistic tropes (jailing homeless people versus letting them languish on the streets) and remained curious and open-minded about various policy ideas. We consider it a feature, not a bug, that Knab has done most of his work in another state. Portland could use ideas from other places—our own aren’t doing the job.
Cristal Azul Otero is another relatively unknown candidate who didn’t qualify for matching funds under the Small Donor Elections program. However, she impressed us during an endorsement interview in which she shared both thoughtful critiques and a defense of the embattled agency she works for, the Joint Office of Homeless Services, the county-run office that’s received intense scrutiny in recent years for its failure to make a dent in the number of people sleeping rough. Azul Otero, 41, says she would look to tier existing taxes to ease the tax burden for middle-income families, and showed a keen interest in holding nonprofit contractors more accountable for their spending. We like that Azul Otero, a social worker by trade, showed independence from ideological groupthink.
If voters follow our advice, those three candidates will win the available seats. But voters can rank another three after that—and we suggest the following people.
Rex Burkholder, a biologist and longtime science teacher, served on the board of the regional government Metro from 2001 to 2013. He wasn’t a splashy figure, but was clear-eyed in his dedication to strengthening the region’s transportation system. He also co-founded the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, now called The Street Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for alternative forms of transportation. We think Burkholder, 68, would be a hardworking, well-liked collaborator on the council.
Angelita Morillo was one of the first people to file to run for the council. Morillo, 28, is a policy advocate for a small local nonprofit that works on anti-hunger policy, but is best known for her presence on TikTok, where for the past year she’s made short videos unpacking and critiquing the decisions of the Portland City Council, especially Rene Gonzalez. Though Morillo sometimes seems inflexible in her left-of-center politics, she’s smart as a whip and we think would bring a fierce advocacy spirit to the council.
Jesse Cornett, 48, is best known as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ body man during his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids. Cornett, though, has more local significance. He’s in long-term recovery and sits on the board of Oregon Recovers, the advocacy group that opposed Measure 110 and has pushed the state Legislature to address the drug crisis and expand the number of treatment beds more aggressively. Cornett for decades worked as a field organizer for the Democratic Party. For all that, he remains a bit of an enigma to us; we find it hard to figure out what he really stands for. But we also think he could bring the perspective of someone who’s struggled with addiction to a council making important decisions about those living on our streets, many with drug addiction. That’s a viewpoint we’ve not seen on a previous City Council.
Among the candidates we didn’t select, Jon Walker, a good-natured policy analyst for the Oregon Health Authority who’s running as “the most boring man in Portland,” provided a deep knowledge of the city’s problems, and he brought fresh perspectives on several of them. We hope he runs for elected office again. We feel the same way about Chris Flanary, a project specialist for the Portland Housing Bureau. Flanary is whip smart and has a deep knowledge of the barriers that keep housing production so stilted in this city. Daniel DeMelo, too, we hope will run again. DeMelo sits on a Multnomah County budget advisory committee and for the past year has been highly critical of the county’s failure to track its spending and its clients. We like that critical eye but want to see DeMelo offer concrete alternatives to the failures he rightly points out. Tiffany Koyama Lane, a Portland Public Schools teacher active in union leadership, couldn’t list a single regret about a strike that cost students 18 days of school. We appreciate her advocacy for safer classroom conditions. Clifford Higgins, a longtime Metro manager, showed promise and we’d like to see more of him.
What Novick, Knab and Azul Otero were known for in high school: Novick didn’t go to high school. Knab was an athletic punk-rocker. Azul Otero skipped school a lot; she pleaded the Fifth as to what she did instead.