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| (L to R) Wanner, Knab, Bali, Beirwagen. |
I’ve been digging into the Portland City Council race in the new District 3 (mostly inner southeast), and I have some good news and some bad news.
First, the good news: Voters in this district will get another crack at this in two years. The initial term of the three successful candidates will be only half that of a normal term, so that the council terms will get staggered. And the first year under the new charter is going to be chaos in which not much will likely get done, good or bad.
Now the bad news: There are 30 candidates on the ballot, and the vast majority of them are terrible.
But I know for whom I’d vote if I lived down there.
Approaching this by process of elimination, I first struck out the names of the candidates who have been implicated in the donation-swapping scandal that would have stolen money from the city’s daffy “clean money” public campagn finance fund. Then I cancelled out three guys who have been hanging around local politics for too long: Burkholder, Cornett, and Novick. Their time has come and gone.
That still left a couple dozen hopefuls to wade through, but scouring the web for an hour or two, I saw that a small handful of reasonable candidates is present. In alphabetical order, they are Sandeep Bali, the pharmacist; Melodie Beirwagen, the luthier and musician; Philippe Knab, the legal aid lawyer and New York City transplant; and Kezia Wanner, a career bureaucrat but one loved by the cops.
I’m more enthusiastic about Bali and Beirwagen than I am about the other two, but compared with the rest of the field, those four are head and shoulders above. Based on this first look-see, I’m not feeling at all undecided about the others. Barring new information, it’s a no on each of them.
But the hive mind of my readership knows way more than I do about these characters, and I’m open to be corrected. The floor is yours.