Oregon Greening
Pacific Greens win five seats

By Mike Feinstein
Green Party of California

Portland PGP candidates, left to right: Steve Geiger, Chuck Fall, Teresa Keane, Lila Rose (future candidate), Xander Patterson and Curt Sommer at election night party in Keane's Portland home.

Photo Credit: Will Stewart / Pacific Green Party of Oregon

Oregon's Pacific Green Party fielded its most candidates ever this November, with five of ten winning either election or re-election.

In Corvallis, incumbent City Councilmember George Grosch was re-elected and joined by fellow Green Emily Hagen, giving local Greens two seats on the nine-member council -- making it one of eight U.S. cities with more than one Green city councilmember.

Grosch, about to begin his fourth two-year term on the Council, left the Democrats in 2002 to join the Greens. "No other political party embraces the goals of ecological wisdom, peace, social and economic justice," said Grosch. "The Democratic Party has abandoned its fundamental core values. Multinational corporations now hold control over both major parties and have hijacked democracy. The Pacific Green Party offered the only rational alternative."

During the 2003-04 council session Grosch completed a five-year effort to get the city to adopt a meaningful sustainability policy. "When I first brought up sustainability as a possible Council goal," Grosch recalls, "I was almost laughed out of the room, because the other council members considered sustainability to be a buzzword that would soon fall out of favor."

Now with the addition of Hagen to the Council, the next two years offer Corvallis an opportunity to take these concepts to a higher level.

For her part, Hagen, a local restaurant manager working to receive her bachelor's degree in photography and art history at Oregon State University, vowed to help increase residents' voices in local decision-making. She also pledged to work to protect local small business from being displaced by big-box retail and to increase the supply of affordable housing and public parks and open space.

In the town of Talent, incumbent Green Wendy Siporen was re-elected to the City Council with 61 percent of the vote against two challengers. The 38-year-old former reporter and affordable housing advocate, who cut her teeth in local politics opposing a proposed Wal-Mart in the area, was first appointed to the council seat in April 2003.

The local Ashland Daily Tidings endorsed Siporen's re-election bid, calling her "a committed public servant and leader who can effectively balance issues of livability and social compassion with the ongoing need for economic diversity and growth."

The other two Pacific Greens gained seats on Soil and Water Conservation Districts Boards. In Benton County, Tim Dehne was elected with 52 percent of the votes, while in the Portland area, longtime party organizer Xander Patterson was re-elected unopposed to the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District, garnering 137,812 votes -- the most votes ever for a Green winning elected office in the U.S.

A property tax increase Patterson and colleagues put on the ballot to fund the district passed by a two-to-one margin, helping to increase the district's budget from $250,000 a year to $2.8 million.

"This was especially important," said Patterson, "because another statewide measure passed that effectively guts Oregon's famous land use regulations by forcing the government to compensate landowners for regulatory 'takings,' or forego enforcement. That is a total disaster for Oregon, but it makes our district all the more important because we specialize in nonregulatory, nonenforcement conservation. We now have a pot of cash to take to the table with city, county and metro officials to discuss how we keep Portland livable without traditional regulations, including zoning."

After the November elections, Oregon's Greens now hold nine elected offices statewide, while party voter registration is at 13,977, fifth highest among states nationwide. Statewide, the party's U.S. Senate candidate Teresa Keane came in third of five candidates with 40,253 votes about three votes for every registered Green in the state and the highest percentage of votes (2.3 percent) of any U.S. Green Senate candidate in 2004.

Additional reporting by Joanne Cvar.