After a weeklong holiday hiatus, we’re back with the third question to the many city council candidates.

In your opinion, what is Portland’s most pressing problem? If elected, what would you do about it?

Candidates got the question a week ago, and had until this morning to respond. Got an idea for a future question? Put it in the comments, or email me.

Howard Weiner, the most recent entrant into the race for the open seat Sam Adams is vacating, was the first to answer this week’s question—he’s up first, followed by his opponents, then those running for the seat where Randy Leonard is the incumbent.

The shorthand version: The gap between the haves and the have-nots was tagged as Portland’s biggest problem by several candidates. Others mentioned public safety, the need to create family wage jobs, and “the twin threats of Peak Oil and Global Warming.”

And stay tuned to Blogtown for a Mercury video—we asked folks on the street what they think is Portland’s most pressing problem.

Howard Weiner
Position sought: Commissioner #1
Website: howardforportland.com
Public financing status: Close to 200 signatures & contributions, according to his blog on 12/27

Ensuring public safety is the most important job of local government. My work in Old Town/Chinatown has taught me that public safety is not just the job of the police.

It takes active local business owners, capable social service providers and engaged residents to make a neighborhood safe.

Funding innovative partnerships between the police, local businesses, social services and neighborhood residents could improve public safety in neighborhoods throughout the city.

We also need to work closer with the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners on funding drug and alcohol recovery programs. Over eighty percent of folks in the Multnomah County Jail are drug addicts; we can’t keep sending them through a revolving door.

We need to fund our priorities first and a safe community is the number one priority for all Portlanders.

Chris Smith
Position sought: Commissioner #1
Website: citizensmith.us
Public financing status: About 650 signatures & contributions, he says

Think globally, act locally. The most pressing problems facing Portland are the same as those facing global society: the twin threats of Peak Oil and Global Warming. This generation of leadership will either address these challenges effectively or all successive generations will suffer for our failure.

While cities cannot solve the problem alone, all solutions involve the critical participation of cities, and Portland has the opportunity to lead the way. About one-third of carbon footprint is from transportation, and another third is from buildings, and cities have tremendous influence over both transportation and buildings. Portland is ahead of most cities, holding greenhouse gas levels to approximately 1990 levels, but we must do much more.

The key will be to use the influx of 300,000 new residents in the next 20 years to help shape the city in a more sustainable pattern. By focusing housing for these new neighbors in corridors well served by transit, we have the opportunity not only to house these folks in a more sustainable pattern, but to provide employment and services in new clusters that will help reduce miles driven for many of us who are already here – either by helping support new transportation choices, or by locating the things we visit daily much closer to our homes.

Indeed, as Portland proves out these solutions, we have the opportunity to prosper by selling the knowledge and products involved to other cities around the country and the world. Sustainability will be a major industry cluster for Portland and our region. We can already see the seeds of this in the efforts to establish local manufacturing of Streetcar vehicles.

I’ve worked on these issues at the neighborhood, city and regional scales and have the policy knowledge and skills to help make this pattern of development happen.

Charles Lewis
Position sought: Commissioner #1
Website: charleslewis.com
Public financing status: About 800 signatures & contributions

[Charles responded with a video. -Eds.]

Amanda Fritz
Position sought: Commissioner #1
Website: amandafritzforcitycouncil.com
Public financing status: Turned in 1,000 signatures & contributions last week

For many Portlanders, the benefits of living here far outweigh the problems. Our city's natural beauty, progressive outlook, and friendly neighbors make it easy to overlook the rising material and social costs of living here. The real wealth of Portland is in all that we do together, for each other and with each other. Portlanders see daily evidence of a caring community. That shared value tends to make us disregard some of our problems, but they are no less real.

The most pressing issue is the gap between people who are doing well, and those who are not. This is the result of lack of prioritization of attention and funding to address inequities that cause many of our problems. Portland's shortage of affordable housing, insufficient jobs with good benefits, lingering social prejudices, and localized criminal activity all result from allocation of resources in patterns that benefit the few at the expense of the rest.

If elected, I will make decisions that prioritize giving more choices to people who currently have fewer options. I will focus on providing core urban services in all neighborhoods, before building even more improvements in areas that already have them. I will work to protect and promote good jobs, for example keeping industrial/employment zoning in the Central Eastside, and pressing for fair employment practices in all corporations doing business with the City. I will seek to preserve affordable single family homes during rezoning projects -- as I did during the St. Johns/Lombard plan while I was on the Planning Commission. I will advocate for preferential awarding of City contracts to companies offering health care insurance to all their employees.

Everyone should share in our city's benefits and amenities. We will improve the city as a whole, by focusing on neglected areas and providing basic levels of infrastructure, safety, and services to all neighborhoods and all citizens.

I have posted further thoughts on this topic on my blog, at http://amandafritzforcitycouncil.com/node/71. I am looking forward to hearing more from Portlanders about problems and solutions, in discussions at houseparties all over the city. Please contact me via my campaign web site if you would like to host or participate in one.

Jeff Bissonnette
Position sought: Commissioner #1
Website: portlandersforjeff.com
Public financing status: 439 signatures & contributions according to 12/26 ORESTAR data

Portland is a great city in which to live and work. However, there are many challenges facing us as Portlanders: expected population increases over the next few decades, neighborhood gentrification, housing affordability, balancing development investment in downtown and outer neighborhoods, just to name a few.

But the main issue that must be addressed is the need to create family wage jobs as well as opportunities for Portlanders to start, grow and sustain locally-owned businesses.

In order for Portland to sustain its quality of life, we will need to maintain a vibrant economic base. More and more in recent years, Portlanders are forced to seek work in outlying areas of the metro region in order to afford the cost of living within the city. This is not acceptable.

Additionally, Portland has a perception of being "bad for business." I do not believe the perception is fully deserved but it exists nonetheless. There are also some who perceive that Portland's efforts to pursue improved environmental sustainability must automatically be at odds to economic sustainability. That is a false dichotomy. Both perceptions are unfortunate and need to addressed as part of our effort to create jobs and business opportunities.

To create family wage jobs, enhance Portlanders' ability to start and grow locally-owned businesses, reduce the perception that Portland is "bad for business" and counter the belief that the environment and the economy are at odds, I will pursue initiatives that include:

• supporting and expanding existing microloan programs such as those managed by Mercy Corps, Cascadia Revolving Fund and the Oregon Association of Minority Entrepreneurs to provide start-up capital to new businesses;

• working with local community colleges, labor apprenticeship programs and other training programs to ensure a well-trained "green collar" workforce to meet the coming need for workers in the energy efficiency industry, solar industry, wind industry and green building industry;

• reducing bureaucratic obstacles by providing expedited permitting and similar benefits for businesses that are pursuing environmental enhancement initiatives or that are working to include environmental design in their practices or processes while also demonstrating a commitment to their employees by providing jobs that pay a living wage with benefits; and

• creating an active, ongoing working group made up of the Small Business Advisory Council, other individual business owners, labor representatives and others to identify ways the City can be a partner to existing businesses, support new business start-ups in Portland and encourage business relocations to Portland.

Portland's economy can be healthy, diverse and environmentally conscious so that it provides adequate resources to residents, helping them maintain a high quality of life. Portland also plays a key role as an economic engine for the greater metropolitan region as well as the state as a whole. It is therefore imperative for the city council to focus on improving and maintaining a strong economic climate while still maintaining our core social and environmental values. That will be a key focus for me as a city commissioner.

John Branam
Position sought: Commissioner #1
Website: john4pdx.org
Public financing status: 804 signatures & contributions as of today, he says

The most pressing problem facing Portland today is the growing number of residents who are struggling to make ends meet. This problem is not unique to Portland. But over the past several years, housing prices and cost-of-living expenses here have skyrocketed and the increasing dichotomy of wealth is leaving many people out in the cold.

It is a problem when some Portlanders pay $600 per square foot to buy a condo in the Pearl, while thousands of others struggle to afford $600 per month in rent. Or, consider that Portland is known for its “food revolution,” with locally grown organic foods and wonderfully inventive restaurants; yet we also live in one of the “hungriest” regions in the nation, with nearly one out of three children going to bed each night after missing at least one meal during the day.

To meet this pressing problem I will pursue four primary objectives. First, I will help lead Portland with a collaborative and visionary leadership style that invites innovative ideas from all, while encouraging us to consider best practices from around the world.

Second, I will cultivate public-private partnerships with leading non-profits so that we can do together what the City of Portland cannot do alone. Our city is fortunate to have dozens of strong non-profits. On Martin Luther King Day, I am volunteering with Hands on Portland to help renovate office space for The Black Parent Initiative, a group that mobilizes parents to closes the educational gap between races. This is a simple example, but to best help understand the city’s challenges it is important that our leaders are intimately familiar with various organizations and efforts.

Third, I will work with existing city leadership to strongly support sustainable economic development initiatives that will offer more Portlanders living-wage jobs.

And, fourth, I will champion the development of meaningful, well-articulated, and forward-thinking partnerships with our school districts, community colleges and universities, to help ensure Portland’s children of today are prepared to be Portland’s leaders of tomorrow. This final initiative is critical. In the long-term the degree to which many of Portland’s children struggle to achieve will translate, with an exponential factor, to the degree to which we are challenged as a city, ten, twenty, and thirty years from now. As tomorrow’s challenges arrive daily we will need all hands on deck with the creative and innovative solutions on the forefront of their minds.

Randy Leonard
Position sought: Commissioner #4
Website: randyforportland.com
Public financing status: Not participating in program

Portland’s most pressing problem, in my opinion, is the widening economic gap between working class Portlanders and the wealthy of our city, state and nation.

As housing has become too expensive for working families within the inner city of Portland, especially single parent families, more and more families are moving to east Portland and into Gresham. Unfortunately, as neighborhoods east of Southeast 82nd grapple with demographic changes—changes driven by economics—they are also experiencing dramatic increases in gang activity and crime.

If re-elected, I would expand the successful program I initiated in the inner city to force irresponsible landlords to provide safe and decent housing for those who cannot afford the cost of housing in most neighborhoods west of 82nd Avenue. I would also expand the effort I initiated in Old Town to focus the police and building and fire code enforcement on those businesses in east Portland that allow criminal activity in and around their premises.

I will continue my efforts to create family wage jobs, which includes retirement and health care benefits, for working class Portlanders.

Finally, I will continue to support Commissioner Erik Sten’s outstanding initiative to use urban renewal dollars from wealthy downtown urban renewal areas to help improve the infrastructure in east Portland, including expanding efforts to assist first time home buyers to purchase their own homes. Additionally, I would also continue to enthusiastically support Commissioner Sten’s plan to assist the David Douglas school district to build a new school using those same urban renewal dollars from wealthy downtown urban renewal areas.

Ed Kill
Position sought: Commissioner #4
Website: none
Public financing status: Not participating in program

I would say the biggest problem facing Portland is lack of foresight. The population of the city is going to grow and grow in the coming years. We don’t seem to be able to fix the problems of a city this size how can we fix the problems of a city that size ?

The state just outlawed party-line sewage lines, this effects thousands of Portland homeowners.

When the sewage lines were built, a main line was not installed down the road in front of everyone’s property the way it’s done now. This was due to a lack of foresight.
Now the state and city expect these individuals to pay for public works, I thought that public works were paid for by the public not by individuals. These people pay a water/sewage bill every three months and should have the same services that all customers have and that includes a main line.

Should these individuals have to pay anything, because of someone’s lack of foresight ?

Since this State law has greatly devalued their property the homeowners should put in measure 37 claims and get the Sate to pay, for the law that it passed. Wasn’t that the moral principal behind measure 37?

As for the City, a law should be passed making it illegal for individuals to pay individually for public works.

Emily S. Ryan
Position sought: Commissioner #4
Website: emilysryan.com
Public financing status: Less than 100 signatures & contributions

Did not respond by the deadline. -Eds.