Candidate JoAnn Hardesty is on the campaign trail to keep her seat on the Portland City Council. A long time activist’s activist, she is a study in standing up and taking action on tough issues. She is up against Rene Gonzalez who is a lawyer and technology business owner. The main issues are crime, homelessness and downtown.
JoAnn Hardesty was elected to the City Council in 2018. She is also a former president of the Portland chapter of the NAACP. She served in the Oregon House of Representatives in the late 1990s. She said recently that she see her greatest power as her ability to pass legislation that protects the most vulnerable people in our community.
Commissioner Hardesty touted some of her advantages. JoAnn believes that because she has been a state lawmaker, because of her relationship with our federal delegation, and with Multnomah County, she is the better candidate.
On a local radio show she stated:
I created Portland’s Street Response, a non-armed response to people suffering from a mental health crisis. They have a mental health professional, E.M.T. and a peer supporter that go and meet people where they are to assist them. The 911 system hadn’t changed in 100 years prior to me being on the City Council.
The second thing I did was work directly with community members and our leader neighborhood to successfully reduce gun violence by over 60% by listening to the community about diverting traffic. Using my bureau, the Bureau of Transportation, to divert traffic, create a community meeting space that now is colorful, it is utilized by the community and we did it with the community.
When I moved here, people of all income levels — artists, creative types — could live downtown and thrive. I want to return downtown to why people wanted to move to Portland in the first place. And what we should do is have housing and commercial space at 60% of the area median income. Because we’re not just pricing workers out of the city of Portland, we’re also pricing small entrepreneurs out. Downtown could be thriving, if we change what we expected from downtown. We’ll never go back to fully Class A office space and big beautiful 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 square feet. So we have to think differently about how we use the space that we own downtown.
JoAnn Bowman Hardesty and Gonzalez were the top two candidates to get votes in the May primary. Neither, however, got more than 50% of the vote. Portlanders will be casting their ballots this coming November to decide who will win.
