Eugene City Council Ward 5: Mike Clark vs. Jasmine Hatmaker vs. Athena Aguiar

Voters will decide a three-way race to represent Ward 5 on the Eugene City Council, as two challengers seek to unseat a five-term incumbent. 

Grassroots activist Athena Aguiar and mortgage specialist Jasmine Hatmaker are running progressive campaigns against Councilor Mike Clark, who also works as a mortgage specialist and usually votes in the council’s conservative minority. 

The race’s winner will represent parts of the Cal Young, Goodpasture Island and Santa Clara neighborhoods in north Eugene. The ward is bounded by a constellation of annexed properties just within the city’s northern urban growth boundary, the Willamette River and parts 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, 6,607 voters in Ward 5 returned ballots. Over one-third of those voters — 35% — skipped the council race, where Clark ran unopposed. 

This year’s contest is among the more closely watched council races, likely due to Clark’s long hold on the seat and conservative voting record. Aguiar and Hatmaker, the youngest and second-youngest candidates in this year’s council elections, have never held elected office.

Asked about the competition, Clark said he doesn’t see it as “running against someone,” but as “running for an opportunity”; both Aguiar and Hatmaker said they want to see a more diverse and responsive voice representing their ward.

Here’s what Lookout Eugene-Springfeld learned about the candidates for Eugene City Council Ward 5: 

Mike Clark

Age: 62

Residence: Cal Young neighborhood

Education: Received bachelor’s degree in political science and government from the University of Oregon

Occupation: Mortgage loan specialist

Prior elected experience: Five terms on the Eugene City Council, Budget Committee, Police Commission, Human Rights Commission, Eugene Springfield Fire Governance Review Panel

Family status: Divorced, adult son

Mike Clark says he’s brought ideological diversity to the council for his 20 years in the seat. 

Clark has represented Ward 5 on the council since 2006, surviving two challenges over his five terms. Raised in Washington state, he moved to Portland in high school and settled in Eugene in the 1980s after studying at the University of Oregon. 

Clark raised a family as he created and led an ad agency downtown for more than two decades and helped political campaigns with communications on the side. In 2004, he joined the city’s Budget Committee, and in 2006, his City Council career began. Ten years later, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor. 

Clark says he’s opposed a number of “bad decisions” made by the progressive council majority over the last decade or so that have come back to “haunt” the city, vindicating his tendency toward voting in the minority. 

He points to his longtime support of moving city operations to the Eugene Water & Electric Board building instead of building an eight-figure City Hall downtown like the council was considering at the time. 

The council often votes unanimously on major issues; in recent months, Clark has voted against more minor matters like returning the council to in-person Wednesday meetings and moving toward a home energy score disclosure requirement. 

“They want everybody to sound exactly the same,” Clark said. “It’s a better thing when there is a diverse set of opinions and voices at the table. And that’s one of the reasons why I think I serve effectively, is because I am a diverse voice at the table, compared to the majority.”

Clark tends to make decisions through the lens of the budget, a quality that he says the council needs as Eugene grapples with a structural deficit. 

He said the city’s ability to “grow the pie” when it comes to housing and land supply, not just infill, is the key to a stronger local economy, and said he regrets the council not adding more residential land to Eugene’s urban growth boundary. 

He said the council has “a lot more to do” when it comes to securing state funding for utility extensions, like with the Clear Lake and Crow Road projects, to make more land within city limits buildable.

“We have to increase the pace at which we’re building new housing for people,” he said. “Rental, ownership, all kinds, affordable, you know, subsidized, whatever words you want to use, as long as the word is housing, we need to build more of it.”

He said he’d provide institutional memory to Eugene’s new city manager as she and the council tackle other pressing issues, like putting homelessness “on a better long-term footing” and negotiating the future governance and funding structure of Eugene Springfield Fire.

“It matters how we land that, and how we move forward, how we start it, so that it doesn’t end up costing the general public a bunch of money at a time when affordability is already a problem,” Clark said.

For the first time in a decade, Clark hopes, this year’s slate of council matchups offers voters an opportunity to elect a council that would vote 4-4. He said Mayor Kaarin Knudson, who can vote in the case of a tie, is “willing to be an honest broker.”

He has more than double the amount of cash on hand as his two challengers, including large donations from the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee, and businesses like Sierra Pacific and Wildish Land Co., according to campaign finance filings. 

“There are a lot of people who have great ideas about ‘We should do this and we should do that,’ but if you start asking, ‘Well, how much does that cost, and who’s going to pay for it?’ Those are difficult questions for a lot of people to answer,” he said.

Jasmine Hatmaker

Age: 34

Residence: Cal Young neighborhood

Education: Graduate of Sheldon High School, attended University of Oregon

Occupation: Mortgage advisor and small business owner

Prior elected experience: SquareOne Villages Board of Directors, NAACP Events Committee Chair NAACP, Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce’s Local Government Affairs Council

Family status: 1 “fur baby” named Ghost 

From juggling jobs across industries, to a decade spent across the Pacific, Jasmine Hatmaker’s patchwork of lived experience anchors her case to voters.

Hatmaker, who now works as a mortgage specialist, was born in Eugene but spent her childhood on the island of Guam, a place that she remembers fondly for its visible multigenerational communities and family values. She returned to Eugene for high school and to attend UO before leaving again for Hawaii, South Carolina, Florida and Arizona. In recent years, she came back again to support her mom’s family mortgage lending business as it struggled financially. 

At any given point over those years, Hatmaker said, she has juggled between three and four jobs at a time across fields like customer service, hospitality, real estate, event coordination and caregiving. She has also volunteered with Community Supported Shelters, Burrito Brigade, Greenhill Humane Society and SquareOne Villages.

Working with seniors and veterans, as well as her own experiences with housing instability and food insecurity growing up with her mom, shaped Hatmaker’s “people-first” and affordability-driven campaign focus, she said. 

“It’s time to have younger, more diverse perspectives on City Council, especially if one of the goals is to really have the younger generations stick around,” said Hatmaker, who has secured the endorsements of all three female sitting city councilors and the mayor.

On the budget, Hatmaker has floated introducing a building vacancy tax, converting unused buildings into housing, limiting short-term rentals and contracting more workers inside Eugene for city projects. During last year’s budget season, she testified against the fire fee that the council proposed to help bridge its budget gap, calling it a “Band-Aid, not a cure.”

Longer-term, Hatmaker said she wants to set up an emergency loan program for small businesses and find ways to expand affordable child care.

“I’m kind of curious if I will ever be a homeowner, especially with our current situation, and I know I’m not the only one,” she said. “That would be another way that I would be able to offer a different perspective as a city councilor.”

On public safety, Hatmaker said she supports expanded behavioral health services to help unhoused people facing addiction and mental illness. She said she has spoken to business owners who live in her ward but work elsewhere, and they witness active drug use and must clean up garbage left outside their business in the morning as clients arrive for meetings.

“There are a lot of business owners in this ward,” she said. “They have been experiencing some of the same things with the difficulties running their businesses.”

Hatmaker, who said her mom’s wife is a retired emergency physician, criticized PeaceHealth for cancelling its contract with Eugene Emergency Physicians. 

She said she plans to be visible at protests and other displays of local activism against the Trump administration because it’s clear, based on the community’s advocacy at public meetings, that Eugene residents want their elected officials to show up for the cause. 

That applies to community engagement with constituents more broadly, not just politics, she said. Residents have complained to her while door-knocking about Clark being unresponsive and his lack of visible presence in the ward, said Hatmaker, who has the least campaign cash on hand of all three candidates in the race. 

“One of the reasons why I decided to run was because of everything going on in the world right now,” she said. “It’s really important that we have the right people in our local government that we know are going to stand up for the community.”

Athena Aguiar

Age: 25

Residence: Goodpasture Island neighborhood

Education: Received bachelor’s degree in biology from Coe College

Occupation: Canvasser and fundraiser

Prior elected experience: None

Family status: None

Athena Aguiar doesn’t spend much time behind a desk. 

After the Sheldon High School graduate moved to Iowa to study biology, Eugene’s great outdoors was what brought her back home. She worked to protect native ecosystems for an environmental stewardship organization, measured forests as a timber cruiser and went door-to-door throughout Eugene as a field manager for a national canvassing nonprofit.

But it was her service on the Library Advisory Board, the 17-member body that advises the nuts and bolts of the Eugene Public Library’s policy, services and development, that prompted her jump into politics.

When the city threatened to cut services and staff within its library, recreation and cultural services department during budget season last spring, Aguiar, who frequently testifies before the City Council, said she felt motivated to act by running for the Ward 5 seat. 

“The library does more than books,” Aguiar said. “Recreation services does more than parks. They are community-building mechanisms, and they are promoting inclusivity more than every resident may know.”

Her goal of making Eugene safe, affordable and inclusive rests on three main priorities: protecting the library, recreation and cultural services department from cuts, bringing back a fully funded crisis response service like CAHOOTS, and discouraging federal immigration enforcement from operating in Eugene. 

Echoing concerns from her neighbors, she said she’d support introducing a “really high fee” on condemned homes to discourage property owners from letting homes sit vacant and deteriorate, and work to find ways to transfer ownership of condemned homes to residents or entities who need them. 

She also plans to push for more sidewalks in north Eugene after hearing safety concerns from neighbors about students walking home from school on the street in areas that lack them.

Aguiar said she is a fan of upzoning parts of town that already have high-density housing — like near the university, versus areas like the south hills — and backs annexing more properties in unincorporated Santa Clara.  

“The people who are like, ‘I’m sick of seeing all those buildings go up,’ I think, are just kind of not wanting to see the city grow,” she said.

A fierce supporter of crisis response services in Eugene like the now-shuttered CAHOOTS program, Aguiar said she was disappointed by the direction the city is taking with its pilot program, and thinks the city should issue a new request-for-proposals for a contract closer to the CAHOOTS model. 

Councilors should exercise more power over Eugene’s governance by directing the city manager and staff within the limits of the law, she said, pointing to the council’s vote to pause the Flock automatic license plate reader cameras as an example of decisive council action.

“I’m more focused on what can be legally done by a council, versus following the way it’s always been,” she said.

She backed last year’s fire fee, unsuccessfully urging councilors to let voters decide its fate after the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce referred it to the ballot in a campaign that she criticized as not grassroots. 

As she has visited with ward residents while going door-to-door, Aguiar said she’s brainstormed ways to keep Immigration and Custom Enforcement out of the city. She said she’s heard widespread support for a city rule requiring Eugene police to document potential ICE misconduct, like what was done in Chicago. 

“There’s limited legal tools, but I want to take advantage of the ones that are there,” she said.

Much of Aguiar’s campaign, which has the second-highest amount of cash on hand among the three candidates in the race, revolves around door-knocking. The biggest piece of feedback she has received while talking to constituents isn’t political, but a perception: the feeling that residents can’t reach their city councilor. 

“‘I just don’t feel like my complaints are being considered,’” she recalled residents saying. “That’s not a policy position at all, that’s just listening. That’s something that I think is really an advantage I have is listening and talking to people.”