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Beginning today, the Lookout Eugene-Springfield Editorial Board is rolling out its candidate and ballot measure endorsements for the May 19 primary election.
Over the past several weeks, the editorial board met with each candidate vying for a seat on the Lane County Board of Commissioners, Eugene City Council and the two candidates in a contested race for Lane County Circuit Court judge.
Today we’re announcing our endorsements for the Lane County commissioner and circuit court judge races. Tomorrow we’ll publish our Eugene City Council endorsements.
On Tuesday, we’ll announce our positions on the Lane County Watersheds Bill of Rights ballot measure and the Eugene Public Library levy. And on Wednesday, we’ll publish our endorsements for some of the smaller ballot measures across the county.
All of Lookout’s election coverage is in one place and free for all readers, not just subscribers, to learn about the candidates and issues on the ballot.
Lane County commissioners
West Lane District 1: Ryan Ceniga
In the West Lane district, where most residents live outside of incorporated communities, spending time on the road is key to earning trust.
Ryan Ceniga has built those relationships, both through his Junction City roots and throughout his first term on the board. It’s a decisive factor in our endorsement of Ceniga for another term.
Ceniga faces a challenge from Thomas Hiura, a Lane Education Service District board member and resident of Eugene’s River Road area. Hiura brings intellect, empathy and several good ideas to the table in his campaign, like opening a county office on the coast.
Ultimately, we feel Ceniga is more laser-focused on the issues unique to West Lane residents — top of which is addressing the limited budget for rural sheriff’s office patrols. It’s a problem that often leaves just three or fewer deputies patrolling the thousands of square miles that 120,000 unincorporated community residents call home.
It’s unacceptable for rural residents to lack confidence in their sole law enforcement agency to protect them when they call 911. But it’s a scenario that plays out frequently beyond the borders of Florence and Junction City — the only two communities in the district that aren’t completely dependent on the sheriff’s office for law enforcement.
Ceniga is fully up to speed with ongoing public safety funding discussions, which could lead to a ballot measure seeking taxpayer support next year. He has expressed doubts about voters’ willingness to support a tax increase, whereas we feel it’s likely the only solution to get more deputies out in the county any time soon. But he’s done his homework on the issue.
Hiura will be just 36 when the West Lane seat comes up for election again. He was late in announcing his candidacy for the seat, filing paperwork with the county less than a week before the March 10 deadline. Four years ago, Ceniga defeated an opponent who had campaigned for nine months by the time the primary came around.
We think Hiura has a bright future in local politics, and the next four years will give him plenty of time to meet with residents in a wider swath of the county.
Ceniga deserves four more years because the biggest issues facing the county today will still be there when a new term starts in January, and he’s best suited to tackle those problems.
Springfield District 2: Sean VanGordon
View the race for Springfield commissioner through only a policy lens, and there’s not much daylight between what incumbent David Loveall and challenger Sean VanGordon offer voters. Experience, economic development, public safety: nuts and bolts governance.
But public leadership takes more than policy prescriptions. And controversies can snowball into major distractions — as we’ve seen repeatedly during the past year. It’s the biggest reason for our endorsement of VanGordon over Loveall (and fellow challenger William Monsoor) for the Springfield seat on the board.
Less drama is an appealing prospect. And VanGordon, the Springfield mayor who has served in elected city positions since 2015, is best positioned to lower the temperature. He has repeatedly alluded to that contrast throughout the campaign, positioning himself as the better candidate to work with fellow commissioners and community partners.
Loveall touts his entrepreneurial credentials, seeking to remind voters of his outsized role in revitalizing downtown Springfield. He’s not wrong about that, and it’s a shrewd move to center his reelection campaign around his acumen as a real estate investor and developer who brings a private-sector mindset to government.
We can even entertain the idea that some aspects of the controversies clouding Loveall’s tenure are less than fair to him. We don’t know some of the key details about his ongoing feud with county administrator Steve Mokrohisky, which escalated last month with a lawsuit Loveall filed against the county, Mokrohisky and the three commissioners who recently voted to censure him.
Yet there’s also plenty of evidence that Loveall ignored opportunities to show some contrition and defuse tension. We get that Loveall feels he doesn’t have much, if anything, to apologize for. But it created a dynamic that doesn’t feel tenable for another four years. If Loveall is victorious, we sorely hope he and Mokrohisky bury the hatchet, and Loveall pumps the brakes on his lawsuit in the best interest of Lane County taxpayers, who are already on the hook for nearly $200,000 in costs related to investigations into him.
Loveall’s other challenger, Monsoor, has an admirable background in mental health work, as a former crisis clinician and counselor. But he lacks VanGordon’s government experience. That experience will matter as the board mulls solutions for issues including the county’s budget deficit and need for public safety funding.
One of the hardest parts of a job like county commissioner is representing tens of thousands of people, with wide-ranging views and values, that may not align with theirs. In a race where policy differences are hard to distinguish, a cool head and a healthy dose of empathy can be real differentiators.
So the prospect of a Commissioner VanGordon offers the best hope of kicking drama to the sidelines, rather than keeping it center stage and crowding out more important county business.
East Lane District 5: Heather Buch
Experience matters. And with numerous pressing issues facing Lane County — a structural budget deficit, funding needs for rural sheriff patrols, looming federal cuts to food aid and health care — experienced leaders who can juggle their priorities and constituents’ needs are in high demand.
Few county leaders have proven themselves as skilled at multitasking as Heather Buch, which is why we endorse her for a third term as the East Lane commissioner.
A former real estate business owner and special projects director at St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, Buch evolved from an affordable housing policy expert when she was first elected in 2018 to a multifaceted leader and advocate for health care services.
Perhaps more than any other commissioner on the board, she embraced the county’s role as a public health agency to support expanded health clinic services throughout her rural district. She also understands the importance of funding rural sheriff patrols, having worked during the pandemic to allocate additional funding despite severe budget constraints that continue to this day.
Buch faces worthy challengers in the form of political consultant Jake Pelroy and former reforestation contractor Bob Zybach — although we feel Zybach’s all-encompassing focus on opening up more county land to private logging overlooks other pressing community needs.
Pelroy, a Marine who supported various local and state political campaigns and served as a legislative staffer for a Republican state lawmaker, offers a compelling policy contrast to Buch. While Buch is skeptical that federal efforts to reshape forest management policies can revitalize Lane County’s economy, Pelroy supports more timber harvesting. He has criticized the county’s slow approval of new housing units in the McKenzie River communities devastated by the Holiday Farm Fire.
Pelroy is most passionate when speaking out against the county’s CleanLane recycling project, which Buch supports. He helped form the Lane County Garbage and Recycling Association in 2024 to oppose the project’s fees for garbage haulers, which he and other critics say will increase costs for residents.
It’s an issue worth keeping an eye on — particularly as the county struggles to find a site for the project, and the region’s largest garbage hauler, Sanipac, continues to send waste to its private landfill in southern Oregon rather than pay the higher fees to dump their waste at the Short Mountain Landfill here in Lane County.
But the costs he and other critics call out are largely theoretical at this point. And Buch’s support for the project is far from disqualifying. She has shown the knowledge to learn on the job, the versatility to pursue policies outside her areas of expertise, a willingness to work across the aisle and get out to talk with constituents who may not agree with her. For these reasons, she deserves another term.
Lane County Circuit Court
Position 6: Amit Kapoor
This election offers a rare contested race for a Lane County Circuit Court judge. Katina Saint Marie, a Eugene family law attorney, is mounting a challenge to Judge Amit Kapoor, a former public defender.
Each boasts an impressive resume and a history in court of helping people without the means to help themselves. But while both may be qualified to serve as a circuit court judge, Kapoor consistently demonstrates his capability, without any blemishes to his record we can find. That performance makes him worthy of reelection and our endorsement for the seat.
This is a somewhat less straightforward race to assess than a county commissioner campaign. In Oregon, a vast majority of circuit court judges — the judges who preside over local criminal cases brought by county district attorney’s offices, among other cases — are appointed by the governor, which usually happens when a sitting judge retires in the middle of their term. They face reelection every six years, but are typically unopposed. Whether or not this system benefits residents and communities is a debate for another day.
Both Kapoor and Saint Marie make convincing arguments in their pitches for the position. Kapoor is an immigrant with more than a dozen years of courtroom experience, who has handled numerous types of cases as both an attorney and judge.
Saint Marie has a deep background representing survivors of domestic violence, children and families, and has been instrumental in expanding legal services to incarcerated women across the state. She might make an excellent family court judge.
Saint Marie won’t say whether there’s anything she feels Kapoor hasn’t done well on the bench. With Kapoor’s strong track record and the absence of any glaring controversies, it’s hard to make a compelling argument to change course now. We endorse Kapoor for another six-year term as circuit court judge.
