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Commissioner Dan Ryan has secured endorsements for his 2022 re-election from City Council colleagues Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps.
He has not yet secured an endorsement from Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty nor Mayor Ted Wheeler.
Ryan, whose shortened first term ends this spring because he won a special election after former commissioner Nick Fish passed away last year, is seeking re-election in the May primary.
Two notable people are running to unseat Ryan this spring. The first is Jamila Dozier, a program coordinator with the city’s Housing Bureau who works primarily in East Portland. Dozier also runs a consulting business that provides racial equity training and resources to organizations. Dozier sits on an equity advisory board that meets regularly with city leaders to address racial equity and social justice issues, including policing, discrimination and homelessness. She identifies as queer and Afro-Latina and has a long history of involvement with social equity initiatives.
Former state Rep. Akasha Lawrence Spence (D-Portland) is also running to unseat Ryan. She owns a real estate company and has garnered endorsements from some key Black leaders, including Sen. Kayse Jama. She is also seeking to be appointed to Oregon Senate District 18′s open seat, which was vacated by Ginny Burdick this year.
For years, city commissioners were reluctant to endorse in competitive races, knowing they’d have to work with whoever won. That’s shifted in recent years, especially as Hardesty has started a PAC dedicated to electing progressives to City Council. So two of Ryan’s colleagues making a pick in the race is significant—as is the silence of Hardesty and Wheeler.
Rubio said in a statement that Ryan “has been able to deliver real progress on our biggest problems, like bringing the city and county together to streamline and advance our work on the houselessness crisis; prioritizing temporary shelter as a way to get people off the streets faster, with connections to the help they will need to live stable lives in permanent housing.”
Mapps called Ryan a “level headed team player” and said that “In a short amount of time he has delivered on new and innovative solutions to houselessness.”
TJ McHugh, Ryan’s campaign manager, says: “When Dan ran for office he ran as an outsider. The three new members of the City Council are defining what the future of the council should be, and that’s what we are basing our campaign on.”
Ryan was handed perhaps the most contentious and difficult issue in Portland: homelessness.
His primary project over the past 9 months has been setting up six “safe rest villages,” or sanctioned plots of land that have tiny pod-like structures on them and will accommodate anywhere from 40-60 people per site. Ryan’s office has said that the sites will include mental and behavioral health services and have basic sanitary and hygiene services.
Only two of the six sites have yet been solidified. Earlier this month, Ryan’s office said that the site selection process has been hindered by a number of nuisances, including: “near universal disapproval of any specific proposed location (strong NIMBYism); reluctance of landowners to consider this temporary use in the face of critical need; labor shortage, as seen by all industries, for the important work of expanding camp clean up efforts, outreach efforts for Navigation Teams, and shelter operators (all of which the supplemental funds from the fall budget process will be alleviating; and leaks about possible locations before the details are settled with property owners.”