Two Cottage Grove City Council incumbents face election challenges

Cottage Grove voters will decide two contested City Council races in November while candidates for a third council seat and for mayor run unopposed.

Ward 1 City Councilor Christine Hyink, who was elected to fill a vacancy in 2024, faces a challenge from facilities maintenance worker Mark Murphy.

And retired office administrator Linda Olson is running against Councilor Jim Settelmeyer, a former educator elected to the at-large seat in 2024.

Ward 4 Councilor Greg Ervin is running unopposed for a two-year term as mayor. And council newcomer Ryan Birdseye is the only candidate in the race to represent Ward 3.

The election comes amid a period of instability for the city. Cottage Grove recently emerged from a tumultuous budget season marked by controversial cuts to the library, the library director’s resignation and a $4.6 million accounting mistake. 

Meanwhile, the results will determine whether voters are satisfied with Hyink and Settelmeyer, who were both elected to fill vacancies after a 2024 recall effort pushed out a trio of city councilors in the middle of their terms.

In Cottage Grove, half of the six council seats are up for grabs every four years while mayors serve two-year terms. All six councilors are elected by the city’s more than 10,000 residents, but four represent specific wards while the remaining two are at-large seats. 

Lookout Eugene-Springfield requested to interview Cottage Grove candidates ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Here’s what they had to say:

Ward 1

Hyink, who has represented the northwest corner of Cottage Grove for two years, will go head-to-head with Murphy, a newcomer to city government.

Hyink oversees regional DMV operations for the Oregon Department of Transportation. She came to Oregon from California in 2014, living on the coast in North Bend before relocating to Cottage Grove in 2022. She secured 53.27% of the vote in the contested race to fill the vacant Ward 1 seat in 2024.

Hyink described herself as a “servant leader” who is “just getting started” with her council service, having returned from a monthslong medical leave during her two-year stint in the seat.

“I grew up in a small town, and I just want to be part of making our community a better place, preserving what makes it great, and being part of solutions versus just sitting as a bystander and watching things happen and wondering why or complaining,” Hyink said.

She said she hopes to bring more business to downtown Cottage Grove. On the budget, which she described as the most challenging part of her council service, she said she’d prioritize funding for police and public safety, which have taken cuts in past cycles. 

“We can still have nice things, but there’s going to have to be some tightening,” Hyink said. “There’s going to have to be some really being picky and choosy about where we’re putting resources. That’s something that weighs heavy on my mind.”

Hyink said she doesn’t know her opponent, but is “optimistic” voters will elect her to continue her time in the seat.

Murphy, who has worked for more than 20 years in facilities maintenance for the South Lane School District, first moved to Cottage Grove in 1995. He said he’s stepping outside his comfort zone to run for the council because he wants to give back to his community. 

Murphy previously served as a union shop steward and bargaining-unit representative for Teamsters Local 206 and the Oregon School Employees Association. He said he understands the “two-way street” between businesses and their employees due to his union experience, and plans to listen to “both sides” if elected. 

“I have a pretty good sense of what the community is, what it likes, what it doesn’t like at times, because they will say something,” Murphy said, chuckling. 

He said divisiveness and a need for more local jobs are the biggest issues facing Cottage Grove. He said last year’s accounting error “truly can’t happen in the future,” and said he “totally support[s]” the library, but did not further detail his budget priorities, saying he’d make decisions as they arise.

Murphy said others would describe him as “practical and common sense.” 

“I really don’t have an agenda,” Murphy said. “I’m going to try to focus as issues come up. Try to look at all the facts and make a decision based on that.”

He also said he also doesn’t know his opponent, except for the fact that he’s lived in Cottage Grove longer than she has. 

Ward 3

Birdseye is running unopposed for the Ward 3 seat, which represents the southwest wedge of Cottage Grove. He is a self-employed real estate development consultant.

He was raised in Cottage Grove and has served on a number of local committees and commissions since moving back about five years ago to help out with his father’s property. 

He said Dana Merryday, the sitting Ward 3 city councilor who is not seeking reelection, asked him to run to replace him. 

Birdseye said he wants to pursue a “dark window ordinance” that would disincentivize downtown property owners from keeping buildings vacant, and introduce more landscaping and cleaning efforts to make the neighborhood more attractive. 

“It’s cleaning up the house,” Birdseye said. “Really, it’s nothing huge, but it makes a significant difference when you’re looking at it as an outsider or a visitor, tourist coming in to see a town that’s clean and open for business.”

Birdseye said “it’s worth exploring” the formation of a community services district to fund the library, as well as revisiting financial arrangements with the school district, like the city’s funding of the Warren H. Daugherty Aquatic Center and its provision of in-kind water and sewer service.

“That’s how I always solved problems throughout my career and so forth: ‘How can we make this work for everybody?’” Birdseye said. “That’s not always possible. It’s a little bit perhaps optimistic in every case, but that’s how I initially approach it.”

At-large seat

Settelmeyer is going head-to-head with Olson in the race for one of Cottage Grove’s two at-large council seats. 

Settelmeyer, a retired teacher for the South Lane School District, moved to Cottage Grove when he was 4 years old and returned after college. He won 54.45% of the vote in a contested race to fill the vacant at-large seat in 2024. Settelmeyer said he approached his two-year term as a “trial” to bring more positivity to local government.

“It’s not that things went real well during those two years, but the group that I worked with in council, when [there weren’t] specific things [being] argued, we got along pretty darn well,” Settelmeyer said.

His campaign mantra this time around is “Keep Cottage Grove Whole” to emphasize his focus on protecting the city’s existing community services, like the library and the pool, amid competing interests like bringing more tourism to downtown. Settelmeyer was one of the council’s most ardent supporters of library funding during Cottage Grove’s most recent budget cycle. 

He said the city should hire volunteers — not just in the library, but also in public works and policing — to help maintain services, instead of proposing to remove services altogether when it can’t afford the staff.

“If we take a percentage out of everything, that is much less intrusive than if we start hacking away,” Settelmeyer said.

Olson, his opponent, moved from Springfield to Cottage Grove in 2016 to retire from her career in office administration and human resources. 

She said she wants to see a “thriving downtown” with more storefronts. She suggested the launch of a firefighting training center and other industry to supplement existing timber jobs.

Though she is a newcomer to the council, she is no stranger to the city’s budget as a citizen member of the Cottage Grove Budget Committee. The city must make “viable cuts” when needed, she said, raising concerns about some councilors’ past support for transferring funds from other departments, like police and the city manager’s office, to fund one librarian position. 

“We have to live within our means,” she said. “We’re not getting a 3% raise each year with our pay, we aren’t getting that cost of living raise, and our average income down here is less than $50,000 a household. We have a very large budget that’s being supported by a very poor community.”

Olson is a member of Community Strong Cottage Grove, the group that led the successful recall effort against three city councilors in 2024 over their handling of homelessness — and sparked St. Vincent De Paul to withdraw plans to build a homeless shelter in the city.

She said she would back a privately funded treatment center for people struggling with addiction and mental illness.

“I think that we have a silent majority that do vote, but don’t go out and wave flags and protest on a street corner,” Olson said, on her odds of winning the race. “I think that there’s a silent majority that feel just like me, and they are coming out.”

Mayor

Ervin, a regulatory compliance consultant who has represented Ward 4 on the Cottage Grove City Council for eight years, faces no opposition in the race for mayor.

Mayor Candace Solesbee, who is not seeking a third term, endorsed Ervin for the seat. He is in the middle of his third term as a councilor, having been appointed and then elected in 2018. If he is elected, a majority of the council will have to vote to appoint a replacement councilor who will appear on the ballot in the next general election.

Mayors in Cottage Grove have the same voting power as a city councilor, but they have special ceremonial and procedural duties like setting council agendas, presiding over meetings and signing proclamations. 

Ervin said his style of leadership will focus on collaboration with local officials, identifying “bottlenecks” to make Cottage Grove more affordable, and advocating on regional and statewide stages for economic development, like policies that would support and expand the city’s timber and mining workforce in addition to more industrial land space.

“We haven’t been able to rally our common voice on our own behalf, and I’d like to do that,” Ervin said, of the City Council.

He said he wants to use advisory votes to survey residents on issues — he pointed to forming a pool or library district as a hypothetical example — to “build public trust.” 

On the budget, Ervin said he prioritizes funding for public works, public safety, fire and building inspections and permitting. He described pools and libraries, which received sweeping cuts in the last budget cycle, as “auxiliaries” with strong support in the community. But he pointed to voters’ defeat of a gas tax hike and the South Lane County Fire & Rescue local option levy in the primary election as evidence that voters “can’t bear any more financial load.”

“Cottage Grove is hurting financially on families and individuals, and so we’ve got to really make decisions about what is most important,” Ervin said.

---

Ward 1