Callee Ackland, Jill Cuadros in rematch for Springfield council seat, this time in front of voters

Only one Springfield City Council seat is on the November ballot as Callee Ackland takes on Jill Cuadros in a rematch of sorts, after the two were finalists for the interim Ward 4 seat in April.

Ackland is a tenant support specialist at the nonprofit Springfield Eugene Tenant Association and serves on the Springfield Planning Commission.

Cuadros is support services director at Eugene School District 4J and is interim Ward 4 councilor. 

The City Council appointed Cuadros in April to serve through the end of the year, filling the seat left open when Beth Blackwell stepped down at the end of December.

The winner in the Nov. 3 election will complete Blackwell’s term, which runs through 2028. 

The Springfield City Council sets policy, passes ordinances, authorizes contracts and adopts the city budget. Councilors, who serve without pay, also appoint the city manager and city attorney and choose advisory board members.

Councilors represent specific areas of town, but are elected by citywide vote. 

Ward 4 is bounded by 21st Street on the west, 42nd Street on the east, Highway 126 on the north and the southern city limits.

Ackland: Hearing from the people

Ackland wants to bring joy back into politics. 

“I don’t want to do business as usual,” she told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “I want to engage with people. I want to hold town halls on a regular basis. I want to be available for office hours. I want to help people understand what’s going on, how they can get involved and how they can make a difference.”

In her work as a tenant support specialist, Ackland said she takes complex laws and breaks them down into digestible, understandable information, something she wants to do with local politics. 

Ackland grew up in a small town near Salem and joined the U.S. Navy after graduating from McNary High School in Keizer. She trained in Arabic at the Defense Language Institute, the Department of Defense’s military language school in Monterey, California, and served for four years as a cryptologic technician stationed out of Fort Gordon, Georgia. 

After being discharged, Ackland moved to South Dakota, where she opened two businesses, a low-waste refillery and a mobile plant shop. In 2023, she moved back to Oregon to be closer to family.

Since 2024, Ackland has worked at the Springfield Eugene Tenant Association, which she said helps tenants understand their rights and responsibilities under local and state law. She was appointed to the Springfield Planning Commission in 2025 and is a member of the Lane County Community Health Improvement Coalition. Ackland led a campaign last year to inform Springfield residents about proposed library funding cuts.

She said her work at the tenant association has shown her “all of the intertwined issues that so many people across Lane County are dealing with every day, and how housing and stability affect every other aspect of somebody’s life,” as well as the need for more affordable housing and the importance of repairing and maintaining housing.

“I’m running on affordability, livability and sustainability because that’s what I’m hearing the most,” she said.

Ackland said she wants to strengthen tenant protections, including enforcing rental habitability standards, limiting rental application fees and security deposits along with banning AI rent-fixing software. 

She said her background in tenant support and her experience as a renter are lenses she often looks through. 

“Our rental costs need to be affordable to the average working family, and we’re seeing more and more people being squeezed out of the most basic necessities, and I think that that needs to be addressed,” Ackland said.

If elected, she would be the only renter on Springfield City Council.

“With 45% of Springfield residents renting their home, I think that’s a really important and overlooked perspective that’s currently missing,” Ackland said. 

She also wants to improve streets and pedestrian safety.

“People don’t want to have to drive over potholes on their way to and from work every day,” she said.  

Ackland said her first priority for sustainability is formation of a “Springfield Resiliency Committee” to bring together community members and subject experts to explore strengthening infrastructure against wildfires and other climate-related natural disasters.  

When it comes to the city’s growing general fund deficit, Ackland said Springfield should advocate for reforms to Measures 5 and 50, statewide measures passed in the 1990s that capped property taxes, which she said are the root cause of budget deficits for public agencies across Oregon. 

“I also want to make sure that we are funding the public services that Springfielders use and care most about,” she said. 

She doesn’t support the city spending money on automated license-plate reader cameras “when they’re then cutting budgets in other areas, despite public outcry.”

“It’s really a matter of trying to engage with and hear from as many Springfielders as possible about what is most important to them, because at the end of the day, that is who the city represents and is responsible for.” 

Ackland was motivated to run for City Council after attending council meetings for more than a year “and seeing and experiencing for myself how it felt like the voices of regular people of Springfield weren’t being heard, whether that was library funding, or ICE kidnapping our neighbors off the streets or the city installing Flock ALPR cameras.” 

At a Sept. 17 Springfield City Club forum featuring Ackland and Cuadros, the candidates were asked their position on automated license-plate reader cameras. Springfield police installed grant-funded Flock Safety cameras last year but removed them in January. Ackland said she does not support ALPR cameras. 

Asked about AI-generating data centers, she said she supports “a statewide data center moratorium while our state legislators work to regulate AI and to regulate the development of hyperscale data centers.”

Cuadros: Doing her homework

Cuadros wants to be fully prepared.

Earlier this year, staff brought a topic before the City Council that Cuadros realized she had missed reading in her packet ahead of time. She said it was a private learning moment. 

“It was helpful for me because I will never be a reactionary councilor,” Cuadros told Lookout. “I am a prepared councilor, and with that preparedness comes the ability to make really strong decisions.”

For her, that involves gathering information, listening to others and asking questions.

“I’ve spent a lot of time going around to the different areas since being appointed, and just saying, ‘Hey, take me for a tour. Talk me through this,’” Cuadros said. 

Cuadros grew up in Port Orford, Oregon, where her father was a commercial fisherman. She moved to Los Angeles, working in parks and recreation while starting college. 

But when an ankle injury affected her ability to drive and work, her parents suggested Eugene-Springfield as an easier place to get around, and in 1988 she transferred to Lane Community College. She used Willamalane pool for exercise and physical therapy and would go on to work for the parks and recreation district for almost 20 years. 

“By the time I was sort of able to get back to work, Willamalane became my first job, and that was it,” she said. “That was my hook. Springfield became my home, and I have said over and over, it was a detour that turned into my forever.”

Cuadros said she started as a day camp counselor at Willamalane and worked her way up to managing youth and adult programs. She returned to Lane Community College around 2013, attending culinary school and becoming a chef. 

“As I looked at sort of my age and my lifestyle, I realized that working on weekends and evenings on a line probably wasn’t going to fit me,” said Cuadros, who has four children. “So I decided to sort of combine my love of children and my love of food.”

She taught culinary school at Lane Community College and worked at the University of Oregon, where she said she ran the Hamilton food court, before being hired by Eugene School District 4J as support services director, which includes nutrition services.

“I came here sort of without a plan, not necessarily intentionally, but with a level of need that it wasn’t difficult to find my way,” she said. “If I compared that to the difficulty that it felt being in the middle of Los Angeles versus how I felt when I got here, like, ‘Oh, I can do this, like I’m going to be OK,” and I guess that’s just always stuck with me all the 38 years that I’ve lived here.”

Cuadros said housing affordability, jobs, economic development and removing barriers for startup business are issues “that I see that I can help move the dial with.”

With declining enrollment in the school district, she said if the city improves housing affordability, then it will attract families to support the public schools. 

Cuadros also said protecting the city’s flood zone will help maintain housing affordability. One of the tours she requested was the 42nd Street Levee, where the city is partnering with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study the aging levee in Ward 4, to determine what it needs to meet federal flood control standards. If the levee isn’t accredited, homeowners will pay more in insurance. Cuadros said that would drop property rates. 

“We want to be barrier-free, if it’s moving to Springfield with housing affordability or if it’s moving to Springfield and starting a business,” she said. “My efforts are going to be focused that direction.”

When it comes to the deficit in Springfield, she said she has “a keen eye and a sense and an understanding of budgets” both from a revenue standpoint and looking at “what do we need to trim, potentially realign, potentially evaluate, identify duplications.”

Cuadros said she has spent many years dealing with budgets.

“In my current situation with 4J’s cuts, I feel like I have done an excellent job at making the cuts needed and still maintaining the core services, even within my own department.”

At the City Club forum, Cuadros said Flock Safety “has its own issues.”

“ALPR cameras, however, are the, I guess you would call it, the technology of it,” she said. “It’s the broad term. And I support public safety in whichever way we need it. … I have the feeling that as long as we have good controls on that information, that information is necessary.”

On data centers, Cuadros said she was “not starting from a position of yes or no.” 

“I don’t believe the long-term answer is simply a no,” she said. “If the barriers can be solved, Springfield is protected and the project brings real, lasting value to the community, I’m willing to find a responsible path to yes.”

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