Two challenge Loveall in his bid for reelection as county commissioner

Lane County Commissioner David Loveall is running for a second four-year term in what is one of the most closely watched local races.

Springfield Mayor Sean VanGordon is also running for the seat, giving Loveall a high-profile opponent who is also in elected office. William Monsoor, a retired mental health worker, is also challenging Loveall.

The board’s Springfield District 2 seat represents the city of Springfield and some outlying areas.

Of all the commissioners facing reelection, Loveall has faced the most scrutiny. In March, county commissioners voted 3-1 to censure him, citing the outcome of an outside investigation into his behavior that concluded he retaliated against county employees after they lodged complaints about him.

Loveall, for his part, has denied wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against Lane County and the three county commissioners who voted to censure him: Pat Farr, Heather Buch and Laurie Trieger. 

The outside investigation into Loveall found he clashed with county employees, fiercely defending himself when employees filed complaints with human resources.

Loveall and his most prominent opponent, VanGordon, appear to have similar positions on many issues, though personality differences could guide how they would govern. The district’s voters will decide whether to stick with Loveall, send Springfield’s mayor to the county board, or vote in Monsoor, a newcomer to Lane County politics.

County commissioners engage in policy work across a spectrum of issues, including waste management, economic development, housing and health and human services. They do not set city ordinances and policies, yet also work on broad regional issues that affect residents who live in cities and unincorporated Lane County. 

Commissioners also work with state and federal officials who send public funding to the county for needs like health care, behavioral health services, public safety and transportation.

They set the county’s budget, currently about $128 million in the general fund, and make decisions about how to spend available funding. As a result, they also must decide where to expand or cut services, including health care clinics, county law enforcement and county roads and parks projects. For their work, commissioners, who serve on a nonpartisan basis, are paid an annual salary of $114,026.

The final outcome may not emerge after the results from May 19 are compiled. If none of the candidates receives at least one vote more than 50% of all the ballots cast, the top two vote-getters will proceed to the November ballot for a two-way runoff. 

Here’s a look at what each candidate had to say in interviews with Lookout Eugene-Springfield:

David Loveall 

Loveall grew up in Eugene and spent six years in the Navy, where he trained as a photojournalist. After the Navy, Loveall settled in Springfield, first running a photography business and then as a real estate developer who has focused on Springfield’s downtown area.

Loveall said the government can benefit from an entrepreneur’s mindset. 

“The entrepreneur sector is the one that solves problems faster, more efficiently and better, frankly, than the government,” he said. “But I also think that the government needs to run like a business.”

Loveall said that the government needs to be more willing to take calculated risks to work more efficiently rather than things that “take way too long to come to fruition.”

Among his accomplishments, Loveall points to his role in Lane County becoming a member of the Association of O&C Counties, which advocates on behalf of 18 Oregon counties with about 2.6 million acres of federally owned land. About 375,000 of those acres are in Lane County. In 2023, Loveall spearheaded a push in which the county board voted 3-2 to join the association, which advocates for ways to increase timber revenues to counties in a long-term sustainable way. The dues cost the county about $80,000 annually.

Earlier this year, Congress approved increasing the share of timber revenues going to counties for a year. An initial county analysis suggests that won’t solve the county’s upcoming budget needs. 

In the long term, Loveall said he wants to move forward with policies that increase timber revenues the county receives. Lane County is a timber-rich region, and timber revenues once kept the county budget flush. That’s no longer the case, though Loveall and others see potential for timber revenues to replenish the county’s budget in the long term.

“Us being a member organization gets us to the table and allows our membership fees to also help the O&C counties to lobby and litigate some of the nonsensical policies that the previous federal government was putting out,” Loveall said. 

Asked about health care, Loveall said he leans toward a scenario in which the government would make health care facilities available to the private sector to run, rather than run its own clinics. 

“Is that our extended role to be the hospital or the clinic to folks, or is it our role to make those available for the private sector to run those better?” Loveall said. “The jury’s still out on that. I tend to lean toward the government needing to kind of stay out of that, because I think what’s happening overall, because of the failure of the health care industry, we’re just kind of pushing the narrative toward socialized medicine.”

At the same time, Loveall said, he’s also a strong advocate for access to mental health care, especially for youth. In 2022, Loveall lost a 23-year-old son to suicide. William Loveall had struggled with mental health. Loveall and his wife had adopted him from Uganda.

If Loveall wins, he would start another term as the plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit that stems from actions leading up to the censure vote.

Loveall said he cannot comment on the lawsuit. But he spoke more broadly about the county’s outside investigation and he disputes the findings that he retaliated against employees, including the county administrator.

For example, Loveall said he previously gave similar low scores to the county administrator in prior job evaluations, even though the report concluded that he retaliated against the administrator with a low score on his job evaluation.

“You start looking at each individual one of those counts (in the investigation), and to me, they don’t rise to the level of retaliation as the headlines produce,” Loveall said.

Sean VanGordon 

Springfield Mayor Sean VanGordon said he offers an alternative to Loveall.

VanGordon has been in elected office in Springfield as a councilor or mayor since 2015. His full-time day job is as an “efficiency expert” at Optum Insight, where he works on financial and capacity planning.

“Local governments work best when they’re not in the paper every single day,” VanGordon said.

VanGordon said he wants people to know they can move to Lane County and build an opportunity for themselves. He said the public deserves a government without distractions and controversies related to personalities.

“It has been in the news a lot, and it does make me sad,” he said. “Because the public deserves more from us. They deserve the best from what every elected official has to offer.”

VanGordon said the county needs to partner with communities and other entities on issues like transportation and getting wastewater service to Goshen to spur economic growth. Yet at the same time, he said, the “board fundamentally isn’t functioning because of what you’ve seen come out of Commissioner Loveall.”

VanGordon said he has regional experience as mayor and understands the value of building good relationships with other organizations and the public.

“If you think about the challenges that we’re seeing at the county right now, the more time that commissioners can get out, talk to local people, build relationships with folks, that makes it easier to figure out, where do we go from here,” he said. 

As an example, VanGordon said, an elected commissioner could become more involved with the South Willamette Innovation Corridor Initiative. That regional project seeks to marshal the combined influence of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University to attract economic development and research opportunities. 

“One easy thing we could do on day one is send a county elected official to one of the biggest economic development conversations that are going on in Lane County right now,” VanGordon said.

Overall, VanGordon wants to be able to point residents toward improvements they can see at the end of a four-year term if he’s elected. In Springfield, VanGordon said, examples of projects he’s worked with others on include the Mill Street upgrades and a treatment court program in the city’s municipal court.

“Our problems in transportation and health care are not going to get fixed tomorrow, but what I want to be able to do as a county commissioner is two things: one of them is look at people four years from now and be able to really clearly describe what I got done,” he said.

Another goal for VanGordon: He said he wants residents to feel the county is making headway in addressing the longstanding budget challenges linked to declining timber revenues and Measure 5, which limits how much property taxes can go up.

I would really love the public to feel that we have momentum to move past some of them and truly put some of these things behind us in a way that is really meaningful to them,” VanGordon said. “Because then we can work on the next thing.”

VanGordon said he’s a strong advocate for transparency.

“We have to be good at telling the public and bringing the public along with all the information that we have,” VanGordon said. “We really need to listen to what the public’s telling us. They’re entitled to all the facts and our best analysis so that they can make up their own mind.”

William Monsoor 

Monsoor worked in the mental health field as a crisis clinician and counselor before retiring. He’s new to Lane County politics and has broad goals for how he would serve as a commissioner.

“I want the community to build trust and share values and mutual respect, and I want the community to unite,” Monsoor said in an interview. 

Monsoor said he wants residents to feel that they belong to the community.

“I will be a responsible leader to support diverse societies and ensure everyone feels part of the community and that they have a shared future,” he said. “And I want to nurture partnerships with local governments, residents and organizations to work together to nurture health control, development and public safety and well-being.”

With his background in mental health, he said he wants to pursue policies that give people in mental health crises a place to recover without requiring frequent moves.

Frequent moves, he said, are “very bad for your mental health” and put people in stressful situations. 

Monsoor said there’s little the county can do with national issues, like rising inflation. But the county can still prepare people for the crises that come with rising prices with adequate mental health care services. 

“We don’t want to see people doing things that are drastic because they get mad as hell and they just can’t take it anymore,” he said. “We want to be able to provide services that are going to help heal people and even though we can’t really deal with the inflation as a county authority, we can deal with the stress that it creates, and I think that that’s important, because there’s a lot of it out there.”

He said he’d focus on communication and relationship-building — inside the county and beyond.

“I would build up relationships with county employees and commissioners, fellow commissioners, to get what you need done right,” he said. “And I know there’s a lot of times that people get frustrated because they can’t get things done as quick as they want, but that’s part of life in general, not just government.” 

He said lumber will be around as a source of revenue, but Lane County has to look at different avenues to survive and grow in the future. 

Monsoor is relatively guarded about his biographical details. For example, he won’t disclose details about his age. (Court records of minor traffic infractions suggest he’s in his late 70s.)

“I don’t talk ages,” he said. “This is America, and you have enough discrimination.”

Compared to his opponents, Monsoor’s profile as a candidate is lower, though he did participate in Lookout’s candidate forum alongside Loveall and VanGordon.

He said he’s not into traditional campaigning and advertising.

“I’m not going to put up the signs,” he said, adding he’s not relying upon “big red, white and blue signs with my name on it.”

While not spending significant amounts of money on campaigning, he notes the benefits of interviews with outlets like Lookout, equating it with free advertising.

“What’s that going to cost me?” he said, smiling. “A couple of hours of my time, right? And $5 a gallon for gas.”

Name: David Loveall

Age: 64

Occupation: County commissioner, downtown developer 

Residence: Springfield

Prior elected experience: Elected commissioner in 2022

Education: Attended a one-year photojournalism training program through the Navy at Newhouse School of Journalism, Syracuse, N.Y. 

Family background: Married, two adult children  

Name: Sean VanGordon 

Age: 46

Occupation: Director of financial and capacity planning, Optum Insight

Residence: Springfield

Prior elected experience: Councilor or mayor in Springfield since 2015

Education: Master’s degree in economics specializing in industrial organization, University of Oregon, 2002. Bachelor’s degree in economics and political science, University of Oregon, 2001. 

Family background: Married, two children 

Name: William Monsoor 

Age: Declined to provide 

Occupation: Retired mental health worker

Residence: Springfield

Prior elected experience: None

Education: Master’s degree in psychology at California State University in Sonoma; coursework in counseling, child studies and music therapy at Southern Oregon University and Lane Community College.

Family background: Declined to provide