On Jan. 6, Eliza Kashinsky became the City Councilor for Ward 1, which includes parts of Downtown Eugene and the West Eugene, Southwest Hills, West University, Friendly, Chambers Westside, Churchill and Jefferson Westside neighborhoods.
Kashinsky is the only new member on the Eugene City Council this year. She replaces City Councilor Emily Semple, who opted not to run for reelection after serving two terms. Kashinsky ran unopposed in the November general election after winning outright in the May primary. She unsuccessfully ran for the Ward 1 seat in 2020, losing to Semple.
Kashinsky has lived in Ward 1 for more than a decade. She currently works for Lane County in human resources as a compensation analyst. In the past, she has been a member of various committees and organizations, including the Eugene Budget Committee, Lane County Planning Commission and Eugene Active Transportation Committee. She is also a cofounder of the Walkable Eugene Citizens Advisory Network where she advocated for more affordable housing and more walkable neighborhoods.
Kashinsky said she was driven to run for city council by her passion for addressing issues in Eugene, like housing and homelessness and helping residents make their voices heard in local decision-making.
In her first three months in office, Kashinsky said that the city council’s agenda is largely set and includes addressing the city’s budget gap.
Beyond immediate priorities, Kashinsky said she wants to see more affordable housing in Eugene and Downtown Eugene to become more of a robust community center.
Kashinsky’s top priorities include addressing Eugene’s housing shortage, homelessness, climate change and the city’s budget gap.
Homelessness and housing
Kashinsky said that the biggest challenges facing Ward 1 and Eugene are homelessness and the city’s housing shortage.
“I think … that (homelessness and Eugene’s housing shortage) are interconnected issues … (and) very impactful for people in Ward 1 and people across Eugene,” Kashinsky said. “I know lots of (people) who want to live here who (are) graduating from the university (or) grew up here who can’t find housing that they can afford … (it is) an immediate crisis that we need to (solve) and … a major contributor to homelessness in our community.”
Before she started working at Lane County in 2022, Kashinsky worked in the nonprofit sector, mostly recently for South Lane Mental Health. She said that her experience in the nonprofit sector and public sector make her a good fit for helping the city with homelessness.
“I have an understanding of how a lot of these processes work, what’s realistic, what’s not realistic (and) what we actually need to do to get things done,” Kashinsky said.
Kashinsky offered broad solutions for homelessness in Eugene.“We really need to be using all of the tools in the toolbox,” Kashinsky said. “That includes things like looking at, ‘What are the barriers to get any more houses into Eugene?’ Some of those are barriers that the city puts in place surrounding things like zoning code and processes … we’ve made a lot of progress on (zoning) in the past few years … but continuing that work, I think it’s also looking at workforce … finding folks to physically build the houses.”
In the long term, Kashinsky said the city needs systemic change to address homelessness effectively.
“[As] someone who is systems thinker, [when] I think about how do we create and maintain systems that are going to support us … in the long term. I think that in order to ensure that we’re not in the same place 10 years from now, we really do need to have some systematic change,” she said.
Kashinsky, though, acknowledged that such change will take time to show results.
She also stressed the need to address homelessness in the short term.
“At the same time, we need to be looking at, ‘How do we handle immediate short-term impacts?’” Kashinsky said. “[This is] a crisis right now. This is going to take time and we can’t wait 10 years to have the full solutions in place in order to start addressing the immediate impacts.”
Eugene’s budget gap
Kashinsky said she believes that structural problems with the city’s property taxes, caused by changes to Oregon’s property system in the 1990s that limit how much property taxes can increase every year, are the primary cause of the city’s current budget gap.
Kashinsky served on the revenue committee that helped develop the fire safety fee that the city council is poised to vote on later this month. The proposed fee aims to raise $10 million to close a $8 million general fund budget gap. Reflecting on the options the committee considered to address the city’s budget gap, she said the fire safety fee is the most practical solution to solving the gap.
“I have a pretty good understanding of what the options were (and) the challenges of the different options,” she said. “This was the most solid. This is the one that I think would work the best, and so I would support it, especially given that [if the fire safety fee doesn’t pass] (we would need to) make some very deep substantial cuts to services that people care deeply about in our community.”
Climate change
As the city confronts budgetary challenges, Kashinsky said she will look at solutions to climate change that don’t have a big price tag.
“I think a lot of it (will be) doing analysis to (see) what gives the biggest impact with the lowest price tag and following through with those items as well looking at where specific things accomplish multiple goals at once,” she said.
Community engagement
Kashinsky said she plans to engage with her constituents in various ways.
“I think a lot of it is really spending time in the community having these conversations on a more ad hoc basis and trying to put yourself in other folks shoes … having conversations in the community both about specific issues that are coming up but also about, ‘What are the struggles that people are facing?’ (and) ‘What are the things that they find important?’” Kashinsky said.
