Eugene City Council Ward 6 | Greg Evans vs. Tai Pruce-Zimmerman

After running unopposed three times, the Eugene City Council’s Ward 6 incumbent faces his first challenger, a longtime neighborhood advocate, in the May 19 election.

Retired educator Greg Evans, who was first elected to the council in 2014, is running against Bethel neighborhood leader and chess statistician Tai Pruce-Zimmerman. Unlike the other two incumbents in this year’s slate of council races, Evans has never faced opposition.

The winner of the race will represent the northwest corner of the city, an area encompassing the Bethel neighborhood and parts of the industrial corridor east of the Eugene airport. The ward is bounded by Highway 99, the Coos Bay Line, Green Hill Road and Clear Lake Road.

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, which each represent more than 20,000 people, 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, 4,418 voters in Ward 6 returned ballots. Over one-third of those voters — 37% — did not weigh in on the council race, in which Evans ran unopposed.

Residents and advocates of Ward 6, among the city’s most diverse wards, have long pushed for greater investment from Eugene. The race will test whether voters believe Evans has delivered, or whether they are ready to turn to Pruce-Zimmerman, a council newcomer promising to bring fresh energy to the seat.

Pruce-Zimmerman suspended his early candidacy for the seat after Evans — who initially said he would retire from council after this term due to health issues — reversed course and filed to run for reelection. But Pruce-Zimmerman ultimately decided to relaunch his campaign after being “slowly persuaded” by supporters to let voters decide.

Pruce-Zimmerman said he and Evans have known each other since Pruce-Zimmerman was in high school, and the two have agreed that whatever happens in the race, “Ward 6 wins.” Evans said he welcomes the competition, “as long as we keep it clean, man.”

Here’s what Lookout Eugene-Springfeld learned about the candidates for Eugene City Council Ward 6:

Greg Evans

Evans wants to finish the job.

Raised in Ohio, Evans learned the ropes of local politics through his grandfather, Carl Stokes, who, after winning Cleveland’s 1967 mayoral election, became the first Black mayor of a major American city.

Evans moved to Oregon years later with no plans to run for office, but he changed his mind on his third day in Eugene, when he was stopped by police and questioned about a crime despite not matching the suspect’s description beyond his race.

That experience, Evans said, was just one example of racial profiling and harassment that he and his family have faced in Eugene — and part of why he felt compelled to stand up for his community by running for City Council. 

He has also worked with the local NAACP, and brought his perspective into classrooms at Lane Community College as an instructor on African American Student Programs and later, as its associate vice president for equity and inclusion. 

Evans, who has roughly $10,000 more campaign cash on hand than his opponent and has been endorsed by the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce, says he’s built local connections over the years that position him to bring more business to the ward in his fourth term.

He wants to finish off long-term projects like converting part of Golden Gardens Park into a sports complex, getting more companies to move to the Clear Lake industrial area, expanding police presence on Highway 99 (a hotspot for pedestrian deaths), and bringing transit and hospitality business near the airport.

“It’s a time where a lot of stuff that I’ve worked on and struggled with over the years has an opportunity to turn a corner, and I want to see that happen,” Evans said. “I think I can stick out another term.”

Preserving funding for police, fire and public works is his biggest budget focus, he said. Long term, he wants to reduce the city’s reliance on public funding through levies and bonds because many residents, like the younger generations of own family, are already struggling to make ends meet. A stronger focus on jobs from private development would support the city’s budget without further squeezing taxpayers, he said. 

That’s why he said he supports the Amazon distribution facility coming to his ward, though he said he keeps hearing “different numbers” about how many jobs it could bring. 

He suggested taking the “controversial” step of consolidating the four park districts, three school districts and two library systems within the Eugene-Springfield area to reduce spending. Evans also emphasized the importance of reaching a fair governance agreement for Eugene Springfield Fire. 

“Some of these things are not going to happen overnight,” he said. “You have to be a dog with a bone, and you got to chew into that over a period of time.”

Evans is opposed, however, to the proposed fuel transfer station in Trainsong, saying trucks running up and down Bethel Drive are “one piece of economic development I can’t get behind.”

He pointed to his work to restore federal grant funding for the Eugene Airport expansion over the summer as an example of his collaboration with city staff. 

“Our federal partnerships are continually at risk with the direction this federal administration is taking,” he said.

Flock Safety was not the right provider of automatic license-plate reader cameras in Eugene, he said, adding that any future conversations over the technology should include privacy and security guardrails.

Unlike his opponent, Evans was not endorsed by the Democratic Party of Lane County, which he partly attributed to his consideration of a proposal to fine drivers giving to roadside panhandlers. (Though he was absent from the meeting where councilors voted on the proposal, he said some community advocates for the unhoused think “I’m not on their team anymore.”)

“I try to take each issue on its own merit, and try to analyze those issues as they come before me, not from necessarily a political perspective,” he said. “I have prided myself on the fact that I believe I could work across the aisle.”

Tai Pruce-Zimmerman

Tai Pruce-Zimmerman agrees that Ward 6 is on the cusp of great progress — but says it needs new leadership to make it happen.

After leaving his hometown of Eugene for other parts of Oregon in his early adulthood, Pruce-Zimmerman returned 11 years ago to raise a family. He lived in a few different wards before buying a home in Bethel, a neighborhood he quickly fell in love with — and simultaneously learned was lacking resources like a neighborhood plan and association.

He went on to help reactivate the Active Bethel Community. As the association’s co-chair, he said he advocates for neighborhood issues through his perspective as a stay-at-home dad. He harnessed his career in accounting during seven years on the city’s Budget Committee. 

Pruce-Zimmerman says the key to ushering in more investment into his ward — which lacks basic amenities like a full-service coffee shop — is coalition-building, a skill that he does best.

“Reaching out, finding the people that disagree, bringing people on board, having a lot of conversations, that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time,” he said. “It’s what I’m prepared to continue doing. In that sense, I fit the moment better. I think it’s a good time for that transition.”

He supports many of Evans’ suggestions for local economic development, like the Golden Gardens sports complex, a hotel near the airport and more business in the Clear Lake industrial zone. But he also wants to see neighborhood job growth, through amenities like cafes and restaurants, that can feed off that industrial development. 

On the budget, Pruce-Zimmerman said “there’s nothing left to cut that won’t be painful to lose,” but there’s also “a limit” to how many times the city can introduce a fee to solve its budget shortfall. Last year, as chair of the Budget Committee, he recommended the city’s fire fee to bring in more revenue, which ultimately failed.

“There are times when overall, the cost to the community of a new fee is less than the cost of cuts, but it’s (that) you can’t just keep doing that year after year after year,” he said. 

Homelessness is an area where the city should avoid taking potentially “directly contradictory” approaches, Pruce-Zimmerman said. He said efforts to reduce the visibility of homelessness, like sweeps and cleanups of camp properties, risk canceling out progress made by investments in services to support unhoused people.

“If the services you try to provide someone are erased when they come back and find their tent gone with everything they owned in it, you’re spending money to erase any benefit of the services you provided,” he said. 

Building more housing is the long-term solution to homelessness, he said, and much-needed construction will require a mix of different tools and reforms across the city, county and state, Pruce-Zimmerman said. Short-term, the city also needs expanded tenant protections, more temporary shelter space and transitional housing options, he added. 

“There’s a lot of challenges, but we absolutely need to keep working on everything we can do,” he said. “It’s going to be a package.”

Pruce-Zimmerman said he, like a “pretty significant majority” of neighborhood residents, supports new development in Ward 6 like the Amazon distribution facility. He said he’s not a fan of Amazon’s corporate practices, but that’s not a reason to oppose the project — and the tax revenue and jobs it could create. 

On Flock, Pruce-Zimmerman said automatic license-plate readers are useful tools for police investigations, but entering a contract with a different company won’t necessarily address the community’s objections against the technology.

The candidate said he wanted the city’s new crisis response program to be more comprehensive than the peer support pilot the city recently entered into, echoing the call of many community activists to reinstate a sweeping alternative to law enforcement response. 

He acknowledged that a broader model would overlap with existing services provided by the county and city programs, but because Eugene’s emergency responders are stretched thin, that’s not a bad thing, he said.

Pruce-Zimmerman, who has been endorsed by half of the sitting councilors, said representing an underfunded area like Ward 6 requires on-the-ground work beyond showing up to meetings and reading agenda packets.

“My biggest focus is just bringing more attention to the fact that Ward 6 exists,” he said. “People forget about us completely.”