Editor’s note: Community activist Amanda Fritz has launched a successful campaign using Portland’s new voter-owned election system. She is the only candidate to do so, thus far. The Alliance’s Julie Sabatier had a chance to catch up with Fritz at her new campaign office on Southeast Ash.

Julie Sabatier: Why did you decide to run for city council?

Amanda Fritz: Well, there is nobody like me on the city council right now and there needs to be … Currently on the council we have five men, three of whom are career politicians and two who have been working for the city for most of their careers. And I’m a psychiatric nurse. I work at OHSU on weekends. I’m a mom who’s had kids in the Portland public schools for the last 15 years. And I’m a neighborhood organizer who’s done a lot of things in the neighborhoods and knows what it feels like to try to get things done in the city from the grassroots level up.

JS: Why did you decide now to go into politics after taking on so many different roles in your life?

AF: I was on the planning commission for seven years and the planning commission is very similar to city council except it makes recommendations rather than final decisions … It was a very interesting and a good learning experience to be on the planning commission and get this training in all of these city functions.

JS: Do you consider yourself a “progressive”?

AF: I try to avoid labels of all kinds. I certainly embrace many of the progressive ideals. I guess if I were going to pick a label, that would be one of them, but I find it helpful to relate to people on a personal level and on the things that they’ve done as well as the things that they say.

JS: Did that strategy help you in your campaign to get $5 donations from citizens?

AF: It did. We collected the donations in two months and three weeks. Nobody else has yet been able to do it, although I think some folks are going to be able to do it. We collected from 90 of the 95 neighborhoods. And I’m saying “we collected.” It was a group effort, a team effort and that’s how I do well. I’m a team leader. And so, we had 100 people helping in all those neighborhoods.

JS: What kinds of things did you find surprising about that process, about getting $5 donations from people?

AF: That people needed to be reminded to do what they said they were going to do … People are really busy. Everybody has busy lives. And that’s another part of my campaign and what I’ll do on city council, is to respect that people have busy lives and they don’t necessarily want to turn up for meeting after meeting after meeting, that there needs to be different ways of participating and that, when they do show up, it’s going to make a difference.

JS: Did you have a staff at that point or were you mostly working with volunteers?

AF: Well, we — I — chose not to raise any seed money because I put this great value in only taking $5 from anybody. So the voter-owned election system allows candidates to collect up to $15,000 in $100 donations and those people don’t have to even live in Portland. I believe that there’s such a value in only $5 and everybody has to live in Portland. This is really voter-owned elections and everyone has the same ownership of the program. So I had to save up in $5 increments just to buy my Web site, which I wasn’t able to get up until the end of September because I was like a kid waiting for my allowance. It takes a long time to save up hundreds of dollars in $5 increments. So no I didn’t have a staff until after Christmas, until I got the [matching funds] from the voter owned elections.

JS: You came to Portland via Pittsburgh from England and I just have to ask, why Portland?

AF: My husband and I did a nationwide search for the best place to live in the United States. And then we had an elaborate scoring matrix that we each used to independently rank the schools, the natural hazards, the beauty of the place. In fact, we still have the matrix; we saved it. And Portland came out top and Seattle, interestingly, came out bottom.

JS: What are some of the things that put Portland at the top of your list?

AF: At the time, it was the wonderful public school system. We knew we were going to want to start a family. And I have been just so impressed with what the Portland Public Schools has been able to do. My oldest son started kindergarten the year that Measure Five passed so throughout my time as a Portland public school parent, we’ve been making cuts. And, yet, the education that my children have received is absolutely fantastic. I just cannot recommend more highly our schools in every part of the city … We should all be concerned about healthy neighborhood business districts and about healthy schools and about healthy communities.

JS: The schools obviously need funding, but what do they need to do in order to improve?

AF: They need a cheerleader, somebody who will tell the public what great things are happening in Portland public schools … The fact of the matter is that the funding is key. In 1989, we were first in the nation in per student funding; we’re now 43rd … We haven’t even kept up with inflation on per student funding and the legislature has chosen to fund the criminal justice system over education. I don’t see that Salem is going to fix the Portland public school funding issue anytime soon. We’ve been expecting them to since 1990. I don’t see them doing that and I think we need to start talking about a permanent, local solution.

JS: What do you think is the best local solution?

AF: I think there should be a variety of local solutions … The income tax might have to be part of the solution. I think we have to trust the people who are earnestly trying to find a solution. Mayor Potter is rightly taking the lead and [his chief of staff] Nancy Hamilton has always been a staunch supporter of public schools, the pollsters and the campaign organizers, the people from HOPE [Help Out Public Education] and the Stand for Children group. These are folks who have been diligently working on this issue literally for 15 years. I just hope that together we can find something that will work and I will support anything that would put funding in the schools for this year because the alternative is not acceptable. We can’t teach Salem a lesson by letting next year’s first graders not learn to read.

JS: Another hot button issue in this election is going to be healthcare. It’s a huge issue in Oregon as a state. What do you think city council can do here in Portland to contribute to solutions for healthcare?

AF: We could do business preferentially with companies that offer healthcare. We could accept or acknowledge that having employees pay more for their healthcare is, in fact, having the employed subsidize the exorbitant health premiums that the insurance companies are charging. We could look at larger pools for health insurance coverage. We could look at what wasn’t passed in the last legislature in terms of price setting and some standards for what hospitals can charge … Passing through insurance cost to employees only helps the employer. It doesn’t help fix the problem and it doesn’t give the employer any incentive to help fix the problem by changing the system with the insurance companies.

JS: How do you plan on bringing neighborhoods into city government?

AF: Well, for one thing, none of the current council seems to understand how the neighborhood system that the city funds is supposed to operate — the neighborhood associations and the system of neighborhood involvement. I can help clarify the studies that have been done several times that said the neighborhood associations are good, but they can be more effective if they’re given funding for these kinds of projects and for these kinds of outreach efforts and for this kind of staffing.

JS: And how can City Council be effective in bringing people together?

AF: Many of their current modes for operating are for the bureaus to come up with a proposal, have a public meeting and then the city is responsible for carrying it out. My style of leadership is let’s ask the community first: what are the priorities and how do they want to address them?

JS: How do you feel about PGE?

AF: That’s something that I need to do more research on. As somebody who was born and raised in England, I’m certainly very interested in public power. It seems as natural as public water, sewers, roads. It’s something that should be cost-effective and well-run and I need to know more about the mechanics of how the city would fund it, whether it would have impacts on other budgets. And indeed, I have folks working on that with me and helping to inform what I’ll be thinking about that. One of the things that I’ve discovered while running is that there’s too few hours in the day.

JS: What are your feelings on Measure 37 and land use in Portland?

AF: The other problem with the current system is it has an ever-expanding, urban growth boundary and that’s not going to protect the farm and forest land in the Willamette Valley that the initial Senate Bill 100, 30 years ago, was designed to protect. If we just keep expanding, the Willamette Valley’s fertile lands will all be covered with homes and that’s not what we want … We don’t need to keep expanding the Portland metropolitan area. What we need is to provide jobs and thriving communities in other parts of the state, which currently are limited by their capacity to expand by the urban growth boundaries. What if we found some places that are crying out for economic development and are great places to live in eastern, central, southern Oregon and allowed them to develop more rapidly in exchange for not having the Portland metropolitan area have to develop on farm and forest land? It’s that kind of common sense re-evaluation that, post-Measure 37, the state can start looking at.

JS: Your home country of England just made gay marriage legal, something Oregon has yet to do. How do you feel about that?

AF: I am a marriage freak. I think that people who love each other should be allowed to be married and the real concern that we have is that relationships of all kinds are not lasting very long. I’ve been married nearly 24 years and I can’t imagine not being allowed to be married to the person that I love. It’s just not fair … I’m very pro-marriage.

JS: Is there anything else you want to say that I haven’t asked you about?

AF: The core message is my campaign is different. I am different. And I want Portlanders to be involved in a very real way. It’s not lip service. I want them to own this city council person and to feel connected and to want to participate. Because that’s how we’re going to be able to get through and thrive and prosper.

Julie Sabatier is a local freelance writer and radio journalist.