Nathan’s Platform

Climate justice is the issue of our lifetimes. Currently, there is no climate justice champion on the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners. I will be the Climate Justice Commissioner. 

Multnomah county has the opportunity and obligation to be radical on climate and sustainability. That means investing in the county’s ability to provide solutions. It also means ending impunity for polluters and extractive industries.

As commissioner I will:

• Ensure that the Climate Justice Plan is implemented, not just adopted and then shelved. 

• Allocate enough funding and authority to the Office of Sustainability for current and future climate goals to be achieved.

• Fight at the dais and support the Office of Sustainability to actually implement the county’s Climate Justice Plan. 

Prioritize equitable clean energy.

• Oversight of private utility companies 

• Transitioning to public power utilities produced as renewably and sustainably as possible 

• Increase community solar and establish community micro solar grids.

• Stop data center development without community benefits agreements.

• CEI Hub mitigation; fuel draw down, and decommissioning

• Electrification of homes and businesses.

Make the county safer for residents.

• Regulating chemical storage along Columbia Boulevard 

• Clean air policies, targeting chemical leakages, wood burning, and diesel fumes.

• Implementing a Clean Air district

• Clean water policies, targeting Cyanobacteria blooms

• Increasing shade equity and tree canopy across the county, especially in East County neighborhoods

Hold polluters accountable.

• Multnomah county is currently suing Exxon mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips for their role in the deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Dome for $50 billion. Lawsuits are one of the powers of the Board of Commissioners, and I will carry this lawsuit forward, until we get restitution. 

• As County Commissioner I will continue to use any and all legal actions I can take to hold Zenith, Northwest Natural, and others accountable for their role in the climate crisis and threats to public health. 

I support new ways for local governments to tackle the problems we have inherited from decades of corporate greed; including a progressive tax on the fuel storage depots at the CEI hub, financially incentivizing safer fuel storage practices, draw downs, and decommissioning. I support community solar, a rate payers union, and the municipalization of services. We need to plan for increased electricity generation and storage.

If elected, I will partner with my counterparts on Portland’s city council and in the state legislature to implement strong policies and oversight we need, at every level of government, to accomplish our goal of climate justice in our lifetimes. As a community organizer, and the co-chair of the Portland DSA Resiliency Working group, I am connected to many community members who have been working on grassroots community resilience, emergency preparedness, and adaptive capacity. 

Someday, I will have to face my kids, and yours. I will have to answer for what I did in these times, and I will work for my life to have an answer I can be proud of.

Unlike Washington and Clackamas counties, in 2025 Multnomah County spent half of its Supportive Housing Services (SHS) funds on shelter and outreach. This approach has not worked. 

Instead, I would invest more in eviction prevention, housing stabilization, and long-term rehousing programs over short-term shelter beds. I support the recommendations put forward by the Welcome Home Coalition to prioritize rent assistance; acquisition, and management of permanent supportive housing; on-site case management and support services; workforce development programs, and peer support. These are programs that have proved most effective at keeping people housed and helping them exit unsheltered homelessness.

Building the Pathway to Housing as a Human Right

According to Evicted in Oregon, a research project housed at PSU, 8,218 eviction cases have been filed in Multnomah County in 2026 (January - August, 2026). Our current approach to housing affordability is clearly broken, and throwing more tax credits at developers can’t be the only solution. Folks living in subsidized Affordable Housing should not have to worry that a pay raise will disqualify them from staying in their homes.

I am interested in working with partners in Portland City Council, across the tri-counties, and at Metro to look at a Social Housing Bond measure. The city of Portland has just released its Social Housing Study. I believe Multnomah County has a role to play in acquiring, developing, funding and servicing Social Housing in our region. Whether it’s creating administrative infrastructure for housing cooperatives, or exploring land banking to keep future development costs down, there are things we can begin today, while working towards transformative regional Social Housing acquisition and development.

In addition to the Welcome Home recommendations on SHS funding mentioned above, two other local studies have highlighted a series of recommendations to reduce the barriers people face and end the “churn of fragmented services, eligibility barriers, lost documents, inconsistent communication, and repeated setbacks” people experience when trying to get housed. I would work to implement the relevant recommendations included in the Finding Home Study (2025) Pathways Study (2026).

Finally, I will work to solve our housing crisis knowing that there are also less visible forms of homelessness, like “doubling-up” experienced more frequently by families with children.

Preschool For All is a promise we made to the children of Multnomah County. I intend to keep that promise. The voters approved an incremental increase of the tax rate paid by high earners in our county, which the board has already delayed twice. Modeling shows that the program cannot continue to operate without an eventual increase in the tax. Therefore, I support the increase of 0.8% scheduled for January 1, 2028.

Some of the improvements to the program I will pursue are:  

• Getting more P4A sites into public school buildings and other public facilities across the county.

• Improving child-to-adult ratios for higher quality care (8:1 instead of 10:1).

• Raising wages for assistant teachers to keep and grow more talent in the field.

• Offering more culturally-specific care and non-traditional hours to meet the true needs of working families.

• Giving providers and teachers more support, and reform teacher training pathways to recognize skills gained through experience, education, and training.

• Increasing the number of P4A sites that are unionized.

• Getting a representative from a union supporting child care workers on the advisory committee, a mandate that is currently not being fulfilled. 

• Expanding the program to include early education and childcare for 2 year olds.

Cut from the top, starting with Deputy Chief Operating Officers. A wholesale evaluation of our current spending on upper management positions is warranted, because as an organizer, I know that it’s often the folks closest to the ground who know best how to do their jobs. We don’t need high paid upper management to tell us we have to cut union represented front line providers. 

To raise revenue, there are several progressive revenue raising options I’d like to explore. I believe a handful of incredibly wealthy corporations and individuals should be taxed their fair share in service of this county we all rely on and contribute to. I am interested in exploring a local tax on data center construction and operations. Lastly, I am interested in exploring a charge on fuel storage by CEI Hub companies as a source of revenue that also helps us mitigate the environmental risk and impacts. I would work with the Oregon Revenue Coalition, Tax Fairness Oregon, and Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP) to identify and implement reasonable and progressive revenue raising to meet our goals.

We think of the Board of County Commissioners as a bureaucratic and budgetary body, but it is also a political body. Commissioners can work with organized community members to establish political priorities and participate in achieving desired outcomes.

As an organizer, I think we can change that. The County should be a site of political contestation; we can win, for the people of Multnomah county. 

As of July 2026, five of the Auditor’s Office recommendations had yet to be implemented by the Sheriff’s Office and the Board of Commissioners: 

• Recommendation #1: Delay full classification interviews for adults in custody moving into housing until 72 hours after booking.

• Recommendation #3: Eliminate the use of isolation as a disciplinary sanction for individuals with mental health conditions. The UN classifies this as a violation of international law.

• Recommendation #8: Eliminate the use of disciplinary sanctions that involve isolation.

• Recommendation #12: Review the results of our survey of adults in custody to examine the areas of concern that adults in custody identified and implement changes to address those areas of concern. 

• Recommendation #13: Explore an independent review function for jail operations, such as discipline and use of force incidents. 

This is unacceptable. Incarcerated people are residents of Multnomah county, and I intend to serve every resident of Multnomah county. 

In addition to using the bully pulpit at the dais, I plan to:

• Work with the next County Auditor, presumably Nicole Paxton, to see the audit and recommendation implementation process through to the end.

• Coordinate with State Representatives Willy Chotzen and Farrah Chaichi on, at a bare minimum, getting our county jails to comply with the audit while we also invest in existing restorative justice programs and reduce the number of people who are incarcerated in Multnomah County.

• Fund pre-trial services. If we can’t trust the Sheriff’s department, an agency of Multnomah county, to treat our people with dignity and respect, we cannot trust the care of residents to the county jail. We must provide alternatives and diversions to prevent incarceration.

I am a democratic socialist, and part of being a democratic socialist is a foundational belief in democracy at its fullest. That means bringing the people into office with me - the regular, everyday people who strive to make a better world for themselves and their neighbors.

I have experience as an active unionist and member of a democratically self-governing political organization. As an organizer seeking elected office, I bring clarity of purpose. I am not running to establish or continue a professional resume that leads me to some higher office in the future. Frankly, I don’t put much weight in the narrative that experience working in government is inherently more valuable than the experience of being subject to it. 

The more important factor is how I analyze the systems that govern our lives, and how I build power and momentum to shift those systems in favor of working people and a healthy planet. My analysis is in part earned through working as a government employee (Metro), which means I know how policy implementation plays out at the most granular level. Having been a frontline public employee, I know that the quality of services our government provides are dependent on the way that we treat the frontline public workforce. I surround myself with staff and advisors who have expertise in housing, eviction prevention, community engagement, civic design, and climate justice. I will not substitute political alignment for strategic rigor. I’m committed to an organizing approach to governance: we try bold things, we evaluate unflinchingly, we adjust tactics, but we never compromise on the goals – raising every resident’s expectations of what the county can deliver, and achieving a future for our county that we can all be proud of.