Of the five candidates running in the November election to represent District 2 on the Portland City Council, only one has held public office before.

Robert O’Brien served three years on the Portland school board and on both of the city’s charter commissions. Wes Pelletier has been an active member of the Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, but has never run for office before. And Atiim Boykin, Nancy English and Catherine Nekoie are political newcomers.

District 2 is currently represented by Victoria Pelletier, who is not running for a second term. The district covers most of the west side of the peninsula, between High Street and County Way, and a small part of Back Cove. Early voting ahead of the Nov. 5 election began Monday and runs through Oct. 31.

All five candidates said that housing is among their top priorities. Homelessness and public safety were close seconds. And transit, affordability and climate mitigation were also cited as important issues.

HOUSING 

Boykin, 48, who works as a community forensic intensive case manager for the state’s behavioral health office, said he’s open to almost anything to solve the housing crisis, including a social housing program recently proposed by Councilor Kate Sykes – a concept that would have the city build and operate middle-income housing. He’d like to learn more about the financing structure, but he thinks building small houses or structures where people would live temporarily could be a good transitional housing model.

He’d like to see the city build affordable housing specifically for teachers, musicians, artists and hospitality workers as a way to keep crucial members of the workforce living in the city.

“I’m sure we need to have multiple answers to meet this complex issue,” he said.

English, 69, who recently retired from her job as a paralegal with the city attorney’s office, said she wants to do everything possible to incentivize development. However, she isn’t ready to support a social housing program. She said she doesn’t think the city does a good job maintaining many of its existing buildings and taking on a new development project may be too much.

And she’s concerned that state law may have to change to facilitate it. So she would prefer to focus resources on incentivizing developers.

She’d like to establish a task force of renters, homeowners and developers to create new inclusionary zoning rules – which currently stipulate that every new housing development must set aside 25% of their units as affordable – that might make it easier for developers to build.

O’Brien, who is 44 and works as a housing specialist with Camoin Associates, also wants to change the inclusionary zoning laws and bring that percentage down to 10%. He thinks the labor regulations and energy requirements of the Green New Deal are also too restrictive and make it too difficult for developers.

“I just don’t feel like in the housing crisis we need to be putting those stipulations on production. It’s nice to have union labor – I’m all for that – but in a housing crisis let’s build the housing any way we can get it done,” he said.

O’Brien supports rent control, but said he’d like to work on making it easier for tenants and landlords to understand. Ideally, he said, the city would provide an online rent calculator, where landlords and tenants can calculate how much the rent can be raised in a given year, to eliminate confusion. He also thinks that using the Boston area median income as an indicator for rent increases doesn’t make sense for Portland and he’d like to explore another data point.

As for social housing, he doesn’t think the city should be acting as a landlord, and thinks it might be redundant with the work Portland Housing Authority already does.

Nekoie, 59, a hair stylist and owner of Hair Update, said she would not support a social housing proposal because she doesn’t think the city should be a landlord. She’d rather incentivize developers by reconsidering inclusionary zoning laws and streamlining the permitting and inspections processes.

She thinks the city should offer incentives for landlords to offer low-cost rooms or units.

“There are people who would be willing to do it, if there are some incentives to renting out their space or lowering their rent. There might not be many, but one or two or five is better than none,” she said.

Pelletier, who is 34 and works as a software developer, supports a social housing program and said he wants to prioritize affordable housing by maintaining the city’s inclusionary zoning regulations.

“Right now we need to make sure affordable housing is actually being built,” he said. “I don’t think affordable housing will trickle down to us through luxury apartments being built. We need to focus on building that housing now.”

He also wants the city to more strictly enforce rent control and short-term rental rules so that Portlanders aren’t priced or forced out of their homes. But the way to begin to address both the housing and homelessness crises, he said, is to stop the bleeding.

“We need to make sure people who are in houses stay in houses,” he said.

HOMELESSNESS 

Pelletier views the city’s homeless shelter in Riverside as a failure.

“It was built on the outskirts of town and crams a bunch of people into one place. That’s not conducive to healing and getting the resources they need to get better,” he said.

Instead, Pelletier would like to see the city manage an encampment where people can live in small structures so they can stay with their partners and pets and maintain some level of privacy while hanging on to more of their belongings than they’re able to bring with them into a shelter. He envisions the city providing waste removal services, water and bathroom facilities to help keep a sanctioned encampment clean and safe.

“It’s a way we can show some respect to people who are homeless. Also making sure there are spaces around the city easily accessible that we can keep clean and safe,” he said.

Nekoie said she decided to run for the council after she heard client after client at her salon talking about how worried they were about the homelessness crisis.

“It made me feel like I needed to step up and do something about it. I felt that my voice had to be heard. Complaining and doing nothing about it didn’t feel like a good course of action,” she said.

She wants to focus on the root causes of the crisis and provide strong support services because when she and her husband tried to offer shelter to a homeless person years ago, it didn’t work out because they didn’t have support.

“I think there is room for landlords and homeowners to step in and help, but the support isn’t there to make that happen right now,” she said.

When it comes to the homelessness crisis, O’Brien said he would like to see more lobbying efforts from the city to coordinate social services with nearby municipalities. He thinks this could take some pressure off Portland taxpayers if the burden of providing social services were more equitably distributed around the state.

“I hope we can start pushing some goals at the state level. We don’t pay the mayor a six-figure salary to gavel in the council meetings,” he said.

English said she would like to see more mental health services and detox facilities so that people living outside can get the help they need. But she’d also like to see the city continue to be aggressive in moving people off the streets and into shelter.

She would like to implement a program that would require a homeless person arrested for a minor crime to enter the city homeless shelter and begin accessing services instead of serving jail time.

“When we have people in shelter we have an opportunity to try to help people get into treatment and get stable housing,” she said.

NEEDLE EXCHANGE

A lot of the candidates spoke about Mayor Mark Dion’s recent proposal to scale back the city’s needle exchange program. Current rules say the city can give out as many as 100 clean needles for every used one that’s returned, but Dion and others want to return to a one-to-one exchange rate to combat needle waste in the city.

O’Brien agrees with the idea, though he isn’t convinced one-to-one is the best ratio, and is also supportive of implementing a needle buyback program.

Lowering the exchange rate might also prompt people to seek addiction treatment, Nekoie said.

“I do feel like there has to be some accountability of returning needles to get needles. I also understand it’s a very complicated situation. I don’t know much about how opioid treatment works, but for the general public, having needles in public areas that are unsafe for citizens, kids, animals, is unacceptable,” she said.

English said the change would create more opportunities for intervention and connection with drug users.

“I would also like to push back on the idea that these needles aren’t dangerous. The biggest concern for me is children picking them up and not knowing better and potentially getting a prick or accidentally ingesting drugs,” said English.

While he said he’s not behind Dion’s proposal, Boykin said he would like to see other mitigation efforts like more sharps containers and increased staff cleanup. He said he’d consider a lower rate, but one-to-one seems too low and he worries it could cause disease transmission in the city.

Boykin said he would like to see the city consider opening a safe injection site to mitigate the needle litter and keep users safe.

“My daughter almost stepped on a needle last year at Deering Oaks park and that scared us. I want accountability. We have to think about all the voices and figure out what a good solution looks like for everybody,” said Boykin.

Pelletier agreed; he’d like to see the streets cleaned up, but suggested sharps containers or dispatching more staff to clean up might be a better way to do it.

“I don’t think increasing the risk of HIV exposure is going to reduce the number of needles,” he said.

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