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.”

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Candidates provided answers in their own words to questions from Lookout. Our questions are in bold, followed by their responses.

What in your background would make you the best councilor for your race?

Evans: I have been a member of the Eugene City Council since 2013. I have been the
president of council on three separate occasions. I was the president of the League of Oregon Cities 2019-2020. I was on the Lane Transit District Board of Directors 2006-2013. I served as president of the LTD Board 2012-2013. I also served on the Eugene Planning Commission 1989-1002 and was a member and former chair of the Lane County Fair Board.

Pruce-Zimmerman: I have been working for nearly a decade on the issues that matter to the city, and to my neighborhood. I served seven years on the city Budget Committee, including the last four as Chair. I have served on multiple long range planning committees for the Bethel School District. I’ve served on non-profit boards, advisory committees, anywhere I have believed I can help people.

Topping the list of my community service experience is my neighborhood association, the Active Bethel Community (ABC), which I reactivated in 2018. I have been co-chair since and am incredibly proud of all the work we’ve been able to do for Bethel since. At ABC we’ve built our mission around the same core tenets that all of my personal work has focused on: community building, community organizing, and community advocacy. I couldn’t be prouder of the successes we’ve played a part in over the years, from putting food pantries into Bethel schools to shutting down JH Baxter’s criminal pollution of our neighborhood, to bringing back the annual We Are Bethel! celebration to our work with the city on neighborhood planning. We have recruited Bethel residents to serve in advocacy roles from the Budget Committee to the Planning Commission to the Airport Advisory Committee, and built deep relationships with city staff and leadership to better advocate for city needs. We have partnered extensively with the Bethel School District. ABC has dramatically amplified our neighborhood’s voice by prioritizing community, always.

I am the best candidate in this race because my commitment is, always has been, and always will be to be present in community, to build community, to show up, to advocate, to build coalitions, find common ground, and to fight together for what is most important.

What would your top three goals be if elected and how would you accomplish them?

Evans: My priorities are economic development, transportation safety, support for effective
and sustainable public safety including police and fire service. I also want to address creative solutions to our homeless issues.

Pruce-Zimmerman: There are a lot more than three community needs that must be addressed, but first and foremost we have to stabilize our budget. No other priorities can meaningfully be addressed if the city isn’t able to fund them. This requires a variety of approaches. New construction is the only way to build our tax base and bring in new revenues without asking people to pay more than they already are in new fees, and the good news is that whether it’s new residential construction or new business construction, this also benefits the community in other ways as well. So economic development, new housing, these are win/win solutions to our budget crisis and to my other priorities as well. In addition we have to review our expenditures. The city budget is already extremely lean; decades of cuts have left all of our departments underfunded relative to community expectations. This makes prioritizing our spending a very challenging conversation that the whole community must participate in, but the good news is that together we can do hard things. We need to review programs we’ve invested in and evaluate whether they are having their intended results or whether that investment could be better utilized elsewhere. It’s a lot of work and I believe we’ll benefit from having an accountant at the table in those conversations.

Housing and homelessness is my second top priority, and it’s important to observe that they are two sides of one issue. My wife and I were evicted from the home I was renting in 2017, because the owners decided to sell the property, and thanks to family support we were able – just barely – to manage to buy the house we live in to this day. But today that house would cost nearly twice as much as we paid then. If all that happened today it may well have left us in dire circumstances. So it’s not a coincidence that in the same timeframe our city’s homeless population has nearly tripled. The long term answer is that we have to build more housing. Lots more housing, of all kinds. A lot of the situation we find ourselves in as a community today is due to a failure to build enough housing in the past. Unfortunately this is also a slow process, and new housing is expensive to build, so it’s only a solution on a timeframe of a decade or more. We must do it, and in the meantime we need a spectrum of other supports as well. From tenant protections to help prevent the housing market from pricing even more folks into homelessness, to more shelter options for those who it already has, to transitional housing, to subsidized affordable housing, and at every step of the way a fundamental recognition of the humanity of those suffering and struggling in our community. The vast majority of folks experiencing homelessness here in Eugene became homeless here, and a lot of the reason why is choices we’ve made as a larger community. Taking accountability – as a community – demands that we work on the issue with compassion and an emphasis on supporting and assisting folks who we have failed. We cannot solve anything by further criminalizing the experience of being unhoused.

My third priority is fighting for the local needs of my community here in Bethel. This residential corner of northwest Eugene has never been a priority for city investment and I hear about it every day in my conversations with neighbors. Bethel needs an advocate at City Hall who will build coalitions, bring folks together, and bring real change and enthusiastic support to our neighborhood. I will focus on finding the folks who aren’t aware of our needs, and bring them on board. I will make investing in Bethel an obvious necessity to so many folks that it turns into an inevitability.

What are the gaps and shortcomings in city services and how would you address them?

Evans: Creating more parks and recreational spaces and opportunities for our residents. We need to create and attract more family wage jobs and create more affordable housing
opportunities.

Pruce-Zimmerman: Citywide services are squeezed by the decades of budget cuts I mentioned earlier, and there are shortcomings everywhere. It’s particularly visible in public safety. Anyone who has called the Police for anything other than a violent crime in progress with a weapon present has probably seen this personally in the abysmal response times they received – if they ever saw a response at all. Meanwhile our fire department is operating today with the same staffing levels they had in 1981 while trying to respond to more than 12 times the call volume they had then. We also have gorgeous parks that we can’t afford to maintain and amazing libraries that can’t afford to buy new books. Our city rec department’s preschool program was genuinely life changing for my own child – I will be forever grateful to the staff at Petersen Barn preschool – and that preschool program is now being “paused” to “refine the program” to “support long-term sustainability”. Despite amazing and dedicated staff doing their best to provide services to our community, there are gaps everywhere.

This is why I named our budget as my top priority. We have to break the cycle of our current systemic budget deficits and bring a new approach to the entire process. As Chair of the Budget Committee I had a firsthand view of the problems, and very little control over the solutions. As a City Councilor I’ll have far more leverage to apply my expertise to turning things around so that our city can provide the services our community deserves.

Furthermore, those gaps are exacerbated in ward 6. There are specialized community safety teams in downtown (a great program) but nothing similar in Bethel. There is a library levy on the ballot (please vote yes to support our libraries) and if it were to fail, the most likely result would be the closure of our Bethel branch. Those of us living in Bethel have gotten used to the idea that when new programs become a possibility, we see them go to support other parts of town first but when existing programs have to close, they too often affect us first.

How would you work with other councilors and city staff to find solutions to common problems? Give us an example of a time you worked on a collaborative solution.

Evans: I have been working with other councilors to form a Technical Assistance Group
to review the city budget and engage the business and other parts of the community to look at where we are going to be as a city over the next 15 to 20 years.

Pruce-Zimmerman: Collaboration is the core of how I approach this work. As a Councilor I will be one vote out of eight. I obviously will never have any ability to do anything unilaterally. My successes will have to be collaborative community successes. I enjoy nothing more than conversations with folks I disagree with, because this is where I have the ability to expand coalitions, to bring new people on board to the projects I’m supporting, and where I have the best chance to learn new things, hear new perspectives, and when appropriate change my own mind as well. This is why I’ve built my campaign around the slogan “Together with Tai”.

The results of my collaborative approach show up in my community support, particularly my endorsements from Bethel School Board members and the union representing city employees. People who have worked with me directly end up supporting me. One major collaborative success I’m particularly proud of involved the school district. I served on the long range planning committee that ultimately made the very difficult – but necessary – decision to recommend closing Clear Lake Elementary School.

One outcome of that process was that by being proactive, and making a painful decision early rather than dithering, the Bethel School District is in by far the best financial position of any local school district in our community right now. A clear success for the primary purpose of that committee. But throughout the process we also asked if there was a better potential outcome. If rather than just being a sad financial necessity it might be possible to find an upside in the closure, by using the building for something positive. This led to continued conversations and extensive collaboration involving the school board, ABC, and tons of other community stakeholders. The result? Not only is the district better off financially, but the former elementary school is now a thriving community center that hosts nonprofits like the Eugene/Springfield NAACP, the Boys and Girls Club, Preschool Promise, and that benefits the community in countless ways.

How have recent actions by the federal government affected your goals and priorities, if at all?

Evans: I am the city councilor who has the airport in my ward. Earlier this year the city lost a key federal grant to expand the airport. Staff and council worked together to restore that federal grant funding. Our federal partnerships are continually at risk with the direction this federal administration is taking.

Pruce-Zimmerman: My work as a policy advocate has always focused heavily on emphasizing that government’s strongest role is to protect those who need the most protection. This means a commitment to supporting marginalized members of our community. It is deeply disconcerting to me that our current federal administration seems to hold the exact opposite perspective on this. The first organized advocacy campaign I worked on at the city level was in 2017, supporting the city’s Sanctuary City ordinance that was ultimately passed in response to the 2016 presidential election. So I wouldn’t exactly say that current federal actions have affected my goals or priorities, as protecting marginalized communities would be a goal regardless of federal policy, but I will say that task is far more challenging in the current environment. My response to that challenge is sharpened and deepened resolve. I will always do everything I can to support our immigrant neighbors, our trans neighbors, our unhoused neighbors, and everyone else who is part of our community.

Outside of any elected experience in your background (if any), what other experiences in life have prepared you for this role?

Evans: I have over 30 years professional experience as an educator. I have raised 4
of my 5 children in Eugene. I have been involved in human rights, transportation, and related civic endeavors during the past 40 years that I have lived in Eugene.

Pruce-Zimmerman: Growing up in Eugene, I have lived in most parts of the city. My parents separated when I was one, and so I lived three days a week in the country with my dad and four days a week in town with my mom. This meant extensive challenges that I never understood at the time, but that are very clear to me looking back. By the time I graduated high school my mom and I had lived at over a dozen different addresses. Her strength and resilience in always keeping a roof over my head and food on the table for me were amazing. She also couldn’t have done it without housing assistance, food stamps, and community support. In the evenings she was either taking care of me on the days I was with her, or working if I wasn’t. She wasn’t attending city council meetings. At every meeting of the city Budget Committee that I ever chaired, I opened the meeting with a call to recognize that not everyone has the privilege to attend our meetings, and that in many cases our decisions would most affect those who were least able to attend. This wasn’t an idle ask, it came from own experience.

City Council cannot be treated as an ivory tower. The conversations cannot be limited to City Hall. We must show up in community. We have to listen carefully to public testimony provided at our meetings, and also go seek other voices and perspectives that can’t come to us to make sure we have the fullest possible understanding before we make decisions that affect everyone. That is my commitment. I will always listen to every voice, and I won’t just sit back and wait for folks to find me, I will seek out new perspectives. It’s the only way I believe this job can be done.