Eugene City Council Ward 3 | John Barofsky vs. Jennifer Smith

A local business owner and a University of Oregon union leader will face off in the May 19 primary for Eugene City Council’s Ward 3 seat, the only council contest without an incumbent.

John Barofsky, an owner of Italian restaurant Beppe & Gianni’s Trattoria, is running against Jennifer Smith, the president of the union that represents UO classified staff, after five-term Councilor Alan Zelenka decided against running for reelection earlier this year. 

The winner of the race will represent an east-central slice of Eugene that includes the UO campus and the Fairmount, Laurel Hill and South University neighborhoods. Ward 3 is bounded roughly by the Willamette River to the north, Eugene city limits to the east, parts of East 30th Avenue to the south, and portions of High Street and Hilyard to the west.

The eight-member council is Eugene’s representative legislative body, responsible for proposing and passing local laws, setting policy and hiring the city manager, who runs day-to-day operations and administration across City Hall at the council’s direction. 

Councilors also have the final say on Eugene’s $1.9 billion two-year budget proposed by the city manager, and appoint members to city committees, boards and commissions. The city pays councilors about $22,000 per year. 

Eugene city councilors are elected to four-year terms by residents of their ward, with half the seats on the ballot every two years. There are no term limits. 

In the 2022 election, nearly 2,600 voters in Ward 3 returned ballots, but 934 of them — more than a third — skipped the council race. About 95% of those who did voted for Zelenka, who ran unopposed. 

With two fresh faces competing for the seat, marking the first contested race in the ward since 2018, dynamics are likely to shift this year. 

Asked about their respective challengers, Barofsky said he didn’t know Smith and had to Google her when she filed to run against him; Smith, who has been endorsed by Zelenka, countered that Barofsky may be beholden to big business due to his industry ties. 

Here’s what Lookout Eugene-Springfield learned about the candidates for Eugene City Council Ward 3: 

John Barofsky

Age: 64

Residence: Fairmount neighborhood

Education: Graduate of East Grand Rapids High School; attended Eastern Michigan University and Lane Community College

Occupation: Partner of Beppe & Gianni’s Trattoria

Prior elected experience: Fairmount Neighborhood Association Board of Directors; Eugene Water & Electric Board commissioner for Wards 2 & 3; Eugene Budget Committee; Eugene Planning Commission; Community Safety Payroll Tax Citizens Advisory Board; Affordable Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee; Street Repair Review Panel

Family status: Lives with his wife, Conni

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For John Barofsky, all roads lead back to the restaurant.

He worked for more than a decade at Italian restaurant Mazzi’s before he and his business partner “risked everything” to open Beppe and Gianni’s on East 19th Avenue almost 30 years ago. 

It was the restaurant where he met his wife of 25 years. It was the restaurant that led him to move to the Fairmount neighborhood. And indirectly, it was the restaurant that propelled him into local politics — first through his neighborhood association, followed by service on city commissions, panels, committees, and, most recently, the Eugene Water & Electric Board of Commissioners. 

Whenever he considered a run for Eugene City Council, the restaurant was the one thing holding him back. (When people ate at Beppe & Gianni’s, he wanted them talking about “pasta, not parking,” he said.) But this year, he said he saw a lack of business-driven perspectives on the council and changed his mind. 

“The voice that I want to bring is the voice of somebody who has run a small business, written a paycheck, as opposed to signing the back of a paycheck,” Barofsky said. “That’s a voice that we haven’t seen on the City Council in a long time.”

Barofsky says his experience working at and owning a restaurant, mixed with his legislative knowledge from service on elected bodies, give him an informed and business-savvy approach to decisionmaking. His campaign priorities: housing stability and affordability, responsible use of public dollars, and public safety and quality of life. 

He’s received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from notable local businessmen like developers Dan Neal and Brian Obie, executive Randy Pape and timberlands owner Dan Giustina, as well as the PAC launched by the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce, which he led for two years as president. 

Barofsky said his time on Eugene’s Budget Committee taught him the ins and outs of local government finance, especially how to maneuver within a budget constrained by earmarked funding.

He said he’d approach bridging the city’s multimillion budget gap “holistically,” examining what cuts would have the least impact on residents, how existing services could be maintained at a lesser extent, and the possibility of offloading city services to other agencies. 

Barofsky was supportive of last year’s proposed fire fee, which would have generated $10 million in annual revenue but failed to advance after a successful opposition campaign led by the chamber. The experience taught Barofsky the importance of community “buy-in” when proposing new taxes or fees, he said. 

“If revenue is one of the pieces of the conversation that we have to fill a budget deficit, what I would really lean into is making sure that it’s broad and community-based before it’s presented,” he said.

Barofsky said he’d use his understanding of land use laws to inform residents about the roles that the state and city play in housing, like with infill for middle housing, and determine “where policies could be tweaked” to preserve neighborhood character.

“This is how we got here, now we’re starting to see the implications of how it’s playing out,” Barofsky said. “Are there ways for us to work within that system to adjust some of the issues that we are seeing once it’s been materialized?”

He said he plans to leverage existing development incentives in Eugene, like urban renewal and Multi Unit Property Tax Exemptions, and he floated crafting a policy to regulate short-term rentals like Airbnbs after hearing neighbors’ concerns that they reduce housing availability and affordability near campus. 

The council should have strong boundaries between policy and operations, Barofsky said. On public safety, he said he plans to “lean on” the perspectives of police and fire professionals, then seek input from communities most affected by a proposed change. 

“Let them come to us and say, ‘This policy may help us achieve the goals of public safety in all of our realm,’ have a good discussion about that with my other councilors, and form good policy that helps them to achieve what they’re trying to do,” Barofsky said.

Barofsky said the council made the “correct decision” in moving to end the city’s contractual relationship with Flock Safety for license plate reader cameras, though he said there are “some good things” about the technology’s crime-fighting ability. 

In the future, the city manager and police chief should give the council a heads up about decisions that could overlap with policy, he added.

Outside of his campaign, Barofsky likes to tinker on old cars. A red 1957 Fiat pickup truck is his current pet project. When the restaurant is closed, he and his wife go on long drives across Oregon.

Barofsky is also 40 years sober; when he sees people struggling with addiction in Eugene, he said he thinks of what could have happened to him had he not gotten clean.

“That part of me, it lives deep,” he said. “I don’t put it out there to everybody, but it’s a part of the core of who I am.”

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Jennifer Smith

Age: 54

Residence: Fairmount neighborhood

Education: Received master’s degree in urban planning from University of California Los Angeles and a master’s degree in public administration from University of Oregon. 

Occupation: Project coordinator at UO’s Labor Education and Research Center

Prior elected experience: Steward & President of SEIU 503 Local 085

Family status: Husband and 1 adult child

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Jennifer Smith’s road to this race began at the bargaining table.

After growing up in Ward 3, attending Edison Elementary and South Eugene High School, she left Eugene for college in California, later working as a transportation planner for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 

She returned to Eugene in the early 2000s to raise her family — “a no-brainer decision” — and took a project coordinator job at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education Research Center, a position she still holds today.

There, Smith said, she found another calling: representing the nearly 1,800 classified staff who keep the university running, from custodians to library workers, through SEIU 503 Local 085. 

She began in a low-level leadership role on the union’s Contract Action Team while she juggled raising her son before moving into bigger roles of secretary, vice president, steward, and for the past two years, union president. 

Representing UO’s lowest-wage workers showed Smith how kitchen-table issues, like rising costs of living coupled with Eugene’s housing shortage, have made the city less livable, she said. 

That’s why, when she realized just before the candidate filing deadline that Zelenka was not running for reelection and Barofsky was set to run unopposed, she decided to launch a challenge with a campaign centered on working families. 

“People deserve to have that,” she said. “When they’re hearing council talking about things, things can be kind of high level. But like, how does this affect us, what are our expectations of this policy and how it’s going to affect the fine-grain operation of our lives?”

Smith said her work on the council would be an extension of the union responsibilities that she does best: diving deep into problems that employees and neighbors are facing, determining who else is affected, and brainstorming how issues can be remedied. Her campaign priorities: affordability, climate action and human rights. 

Direct engagement with communities on the ground, not just quantitative data, would anchor her decisions, she said.

“The knowledge is there,” she said. “It’s pulling in a lot of community voices and people who are experiencing things day to day.”

Several unions and labor leaders, including chapters representing faculty, sheet metal workers and carpenters, have endorsed Smith. (Barofsky has been endorsed by IAFF Local 851, the union representing county firefighters, EMTs and paramedics.)  

On housing, Smith said she wants more city oversight of publicly funded development, particularly student housing projects backed by out-of-state stakeholders, to ensure high-quality construction and fair rent prices. 

She supports bolstered tenant protections, like ending no-cause evictions and passing a Eugene Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which she sees as the first step to preventing people from slipping into homelessness. Smith also said she’d back a rental vacancy tax.

“We need to make it possible for developers to build some of these units,” Smith said. “We need to also have a say in how these are presented on the market.”

When it comes to budget decision-making, which she said would be the hardest part of the job, Smith said she’d prioritize protecting social services like libraries, parks and recreation, and crisis response.

“Workers are very frequently the scapegoat,” Smith said. “We’re often the first expendable element on a budget, and I kind of reject that.”

Smith, a cyclist and a transportation planner by trade, said she’d fight for walkable neighborhoods, increased public transit and more protected bike lanes — one piece of her larger focus on climate. 

She hopes to work with community partners to make progress on Eugene’s environmental goals, like halving the city’s use of fossil fuels by 2030, and supports investing in community solar panels and storage. 

“Even though right now the federal regime is not open to a lot of innovation in this space, we can still keep working on these policies and build out these projects that we can apply here,” Smith said. 

For Smith, the third branch of her campaign — fighting fascism — looks like protecting and affirming the rights of Eugene’s immigrants, LGBTQ+ community, and unhoused population. 

She said she’d use her office as a bully pulpit for amplifying those values given City Council’s limited power over the federal government. 

Smith also opposes fencing on any city property around the federal building, and said she is “suspicious” of license plate reader cameras and the overall growth of the “surveillance state,” but is open to hearing all policy angles for the technology. 

“All we can do is, on the local level is keep having a bulwark against the overreach,” Smith said. 

In her free time, Smith is an “avid reader” of science fiction. (She said she has been in the same science fiction book group since 2007.) In the spring and summer, Smith said she enjoys container gardening and going on long walks through the ward with her husband.