‘Ranked Choice’ voting finally resolves District 3 and 4 races

Published 12:00 am Sunday, December 22, 2024

It took quite some time for the complicated mathematical reductions of “Ranked Choice” voting to arrive at the final three winners in Portland’s first City Council races in Districts 3 and 4, in which the fields were choked with candidates.

In the end, in District 3, the winners were school teacher Tiffany Koyama-Lane, state lobbyist Angelita Morillo, and former Portland Commissioner Steve Novick, in a district which is entirely located in Southeast Portland – and which includes Brooklyn, Creston-Kenilworth, Woodstock, and Brentwood-Darlington, among others.

District 4, which includes all of Portland west of the Willamette River – but which was also stretched to include Sellwood, Westmoreland, Eastmoreland, Reed, and the Portland portion of Milwaukie’s Ardenwald neighborhood – wound up with the three winners being Olivia Clark, a former TriMet official; economist Mitch Green; and, in a very narrow win over Eli Arnold, a Sellwood resident who is also a downtown bicycle policeman, Multnomah County official Eric Zimmerman was eventually awarded the third seat.

KOIN-TV, a news partner of the Carpenter Media Group, of which THE BEE is a member, reported that Olivia Clark was the easy first-place finisher in District 4, after which Morning News Anchor Ken Boddie interviewed her about her plans on the newly-constituted 12-member Portland City Council. She said that her priorities are broadly in the areas of public safety and affordable housing.

“Public Safety means not just more police on the streets, but it really means making sure that the response time is improved – that if you dial 911, somebody actually answers the phone and somebody gets there within a reasonable amount of time,” she said.

“The homeless issue is a part of public safety. It’s not safe for people to be living on the streets, and it’s not good for the rest of us either. And housing development – we need more affordable housing. We need to streamline our permitting process. I know the current City Council has worked on that, but it’s up to us to implement it.”

KOIN is based downtown – leading Boddie to observe that one of the other big issues that’s happening in downtown Portland involves the “incredibly high office vacancy rate. Workers are not coming back downtown, and some of landmark businesses such as U.S. Bank and the Portland Clinic are closing services due to safety concerns.”

Clark replied that the solution to that is finding even more ways to bring people back. “We need to have more housing downtown, and we need to look at options for activating the storefronts that are empty downtown,” she said. “But I’ll be looking to the property owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and others, for ideas about how we activate what we’ve got.”

Additionally, Clark has previously said Portland needs to “revisit the climate emergency action plan that allocates Portland Clean Energy Fund money to mitigate climate change.” As a result, she says she is encouraging other incoming City Council members to see how, or if, they would prioritize each of the items listed in the plan, all in the name of preparedness.

“One of the other things I’ve said on the campaign trail is that I want to make sure that all the City Bureaus – particularly infrastructure Bureaus – are ready for climate change, that they’re prepared, that there’s resiliency, redundancy,” she commented. “So for example, if the water gets cut off to my building, I want to know the water department, the water bureau, has a plan for how to restore that, because there are huge climate changes coming through.”

The new-look Portland City Council – led by its new Mayor, Keith Wilson – will take office in January.