Eugene City Council Ward 4 | Jennifer Yeh vs. Tom Stedman

A two-term incumbent faces a challenge from a retired veteran in the race to represent Ward 4 on the Eugene City Council. 

Councilor Jennifer Yeh, who has served on the council since 2017 and works for Community Supported Shelters, is running against Tom Stedman, who worked in industrial maintenance and chemical screening before serving as a medic for CAHOOTS. 

The winner of the race will represent the northeast wedge of Eugene, encompassing the Harlow  and Northeast neighborhoods. Ward 4 is bounded roughly by city limits to the north, Interstate 5 to the east, the Willamette River to the south, and segments of Oakway and Gilham roads 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, 5,164 voters in Ward 4 returned ballots. Roughly 10% of those voters didn’t weigh in on the council race, where Yeh narrowly won against a challenger. 

This matchup will likely look different: Stedman is door-knocking, but has not fundraised, launched a website or purchased campaign materials like mailers and yard signs, setting up a clear contrast with Yeh’s conventional reelection campaign.

Asked about their respective challengers, Yeh said characterizing her race as contested is “probably a stretch.” Stedman said he primarily entered the race for practice, but believes he can “win it readily.” 

Here’s what Lookout Eugene-Springfeld learned about the candidates for Eugene City Council Ward 4:

Jennifer Yeh

Age: 51 

Residence: Harlow neighborhood

Education: Bachelor’s degree from University of Oregon

Occupation: Development manager at Community Supported Shelters 

Prior elected experience: Eugene City Council, Harlow Neighbors Association, Neighborhood Leaders Council

Family status: Lives with husband

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With two terms under her belt, Councilor Jennifer Yeh is running for reelection as a steady hand.

When the University of Oregon graduate returned to Eugene to raise her family after living in other parts of the state, she followed in the footsteps of her parents, who volunteered for their church and local schools growing up, by joining the Harlow Neighbors Association. 

The decade she went on to spend on its board, blended with her own experience as a mom, showed her what it’s like to work and live in Eugene — and deepened her belief in a local government that reflects the diversity of her neighborhood and its needs, she said. 

She took that belief to the council in 2017, when she was appointed to the Ward 4 seat and brought with her nonprofit workplace experience; she worked for eight years at the Lane County History Museum, and now serves as Community Supported Shelters’ development manager.

After nine years representing Ward 4, Yeh says she’s a voice of stability equipped to steer her community through the next four years, which, between Eugene’s upcoming turbulent budget cycle and new city manager, are likely to bring much change. 

“We’re going to be making very uncomfortable decisions as a community going forward, and we may have new people on council, and I’m confident they will do an excellent job, but I feel like my years of experience can be really beneficial in that space,” Yeh said. 

With limited pay and responsibility, city councilors can “easily phone it in,” Yeh said, describing her own self motivation as the driving force behind her council work and a source of personal pride. 

Over the years, Yeh added, she has become more decisive and confident in her leadership, recognizing that good governance is a “team sport” and often leads to compromises that don’t satisfy everyone.

Yeh’s overall budget philosophy: If the city must choose between doing 10 things poorly or six things very well, she’s choosing the latter. When it comes to cuts to services and staff, Yeh said Eugene should protect services for the city’s most vulnerable community members. 

If reelected, Yeh said she’d strengthen community engagement on the budget, which would prevent perceptions of local government lacking transparency like during last year’s fire fee proposal, and would allow councilors to anticipate unintended outcomes, like inadvertently shifting work onto volunteers, she said. More broadly, the council could do a better job working with members of the city’s boards and commissions, Yeh added. 

“One of our jobs is communicating to our community, and we are not getting a good grade in that area,” Yeh said.

Yeh said the city has “made progress” on ushering in new housing using Accelerated Multi-Unit Property Tax Exemptions and Downtown Fee Assistance programs, but she wants to continue to find ways to support development outside of downtown, especially along major transit routes. 

“The thing most people talk about when they’re talking to me in my community is housing affordability,” she said. 

Yeh said she’d support entering a second contract for automatic license-plate reader cameras only if a vendor could offer the security and privacy guardrails that the city deems appropriate.

She said she is “100% on board” to find legal ways to make it harder for the federal government to conduct operations in Eugene like immigration enforcement, though she acknowledged the risks of making the city a target for federal intervention.

“Right now, in our nation and in our community, I think people are feeling a lot of uncertainty, and it can sometimes feel chaotic, what’s going on,” she said. “But our community, here in Eugene, doesn’t have to be that way.”

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Tom Stedman

Age: 70

Residence: Cal Young area

Education: Associates degree in industrial science from Lane Community College, completed emergency medical technician program from LCC, completed Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue’s Prehospital Trauma Life Support training program

Occupation: Retired, but formerly Sergeant (E-5) in the 9th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, production and union representative at Weyerhaeuser Paper, Army Corps of Engineers, CAHOOTS medic

Prior elected experience: Union positions

Family status: Lives alone

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Tom Stedman is running a campaign for people he says have been left out of conversations at City Hall. 

After being discharged from the Army and moving to Eugene in the late 1970s, Stedman worked in a number of industrial jobs, including for Weyerhaeuser and the Army Corps of Engineers. 

There, and during his Army service, he said he witnessed rampant workplace discrimination and harassment against employees from marginalized communities — including false accusations of drug possession — which drove him to advocate for better workplace protections through union and lobbying efforts. 

After retiring, Stedman worked for years as a medic for CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets), the nationally recognized local crisis response service that shut down last year in Eugene. He treated vulnerable people experiencing addiction and homelessness. 

His background in industrial chemical screening also led him to serve on the city’s Toxics Board, the seven-member body that helps regulate the local use of hazardous substances. 

Stedman said the centerpiece of his grassroots campaign, and his focus if elected, are “boots on the ground workers” — blue-collar city employees and community members he feels are underrepresented on the council and, more broadly, the local political establishment. 

He said he generated his campaign priorities by jotting down notes while door-knocking and by approaching city employees working on the street. 

“The people that have the knowledge are the folks that do the work for us,” Stedman said, adding: “I’ve always been told I have a way with people, how to make them open up, communicate, share.”

His approach to the budget is based around shielding staff from budget cuts, particularly hourly workers like Public Works maintenance crews, who he said weren’t included in previous conversations about how to narrow the city’s shortfall. 

“It’s like, when you raise your hand in school, they’re just like, ‘We’ve moved on from that,” he said. “I think I would be able to say, ‘Let’s just hold on a second.’”

He didn’t offer many details of how he’d protect those staff from possible cuts, but he spoke of the risks that could come from them — public safety and public works staff getting hurt on the job from performing work that they’re not trained for — and suggested that Eugene could prioritize trimming spending and staffing in management-level positions instead. 

Stedman said he fears the new city manager’s record when it comes to hourly staff, describing it as “cut, slash and burn”; the former Beaverton city manager bridged a $10.7 million budget shortfall in the 2025-26 fiscal year largely by cutting staff, though most positions were vacant. 

“My experience in labor, you can’t be afraid to step on toes,” he said. “You really can’t.”

On public safety, the former CAHOOTS medic criticized the city’s new crisis response pilot program as being insufficient to address the needs on the ground due to its staffing structure and geographic boundaries. 

“Their plan they have now, it’s not CAHOOTS,” he said. “It’s not going to serve the community as a whole. They need a medic. They need to service the south hills, Cal Young, Santa Clara.” 

He said he supports establishing a fire district, a form of governance for Eugene Springfield Fire that the cities have so far opted against, and is opposed to Flock Safety and other companies that sell automatic license-plate reader technology. 

Stedman also shared deep concern about potential environmental harms from industry development and practices across the state, varying from data centers and water rights, to the Trainsong fuel transfer station.