Why vote for Jon?

My top three priorities are:

IMPLEMENTATION, IMPLEMENTATION, IMPLEMENTATION

Portland does not lack for good ideas or good intentions. The people of Portland are generously willing to fund numerous, well-meaning ideas to help others. What the city lacks is a focus on how to turn good ideas into good outcomes. That is why the city needs me: I will always ask, “How will we make this work in practice?”

Here's what I'm talking about: We have a tax to fund art, which is a great idea, but we designed it in the most clumsy and wasteful way possible. We have a roads department which puts in bike lanes and then removes them next week. We have a well funded  Joint Office of Homeless Services, but the design of the program is a mess -- a recent audit found it was unable to collect data so we have no idea what works or doesn't. We have a Street Response Team but because the primary focus was not implementation but weird Commissioner fiefdom building it’s funding stream, bureau placement, and mission have been a mess. We had the longest teacher strike in Oregon history yet none of the city or county leaders stepped up to help. It doesn’t matter how much money you are throwing at a problem if you don’t have people focus on implementation. The challenge we face in Portland is not whether to do this new program or that new program it is how to do what we are doing but 20% better.

I want to be your second choice!

I want to be your second choice. One of the exciting new elements of the city council is that candidates will be selected by ranked choice voting and if your top choice does well enough your vote will transfer to your second and third choices. There might be candidates you feel are more inline with your specific policy vision but I want you to know I bring something unique. My focus is on implementation and doing a performance audit of every part of the city government. Whatever the council chooses to do I want to be there to make sure we do it in the most effective way possible.

Here’s the approach:

I want to make Portland a city for families. Children are inherently the most vulnerable members of our society. When you build a city that is safe, accessible, and affordable for children you inherently end up building a city that is safe, accessible, and affordable for everyone else.

I can bring policy and financial expertise to bear on our city’s problems. For a decade as a progressive activist and journalist, I covered the implementation of programs. For past two years, I have been the policy analyst at the Office of Actuarial and Financial Analytics. I know what questions need to be asked to see if an idea can work in practice.

The expanded city council should be a group of problem solvers. I want the people of my district to bring me their problems, big and small. First, so I can help my constituents with their immediate problem -- but then, so I can spend my time investigating the root causes to see if I can prevent anyone else in the city from ever having the same problem again.