Tiffany Koyama Lane, incumbent member of Portland City Council for District 3, was an school teacher at Sunnyside K-12 when she got active in her union, Portland Association of Teachers, and in a successful county-wide campaign for universal preschool. A graduate of the Oregon Labor Candidate School, she’s also a signer of ‘no police union money’ pledge. On city council she helped pass ordinances renaming Chavez Boulevard to Campesinos Boulevard, discouraging single gender restrooms, banning foie gras, and barring housing discrimination against throuples. If re-elected she wants to work on reducing management bloat at the city and to pass ordinances protecting domestic workers and app-based drivers.
Labor organization endorsers: AAUP/PSU, AFSCME, AFSCME 189, AFT/PCCFFAP, LIUNA 483, Protec17, SEIU, UBC, UFCW 555
More: teachertiffanyforthepeople.com
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS: Thanks for taking the time to talk about the last two years and make the case for why our readers should give you another four years. Probably one of the most painful things you had to deal with in the last two years is budget wrangling. Each year you’re presented with cuts. What’s your narrative of the budget? What’s going wrong? What would you like to see being done differently?
TIFFANY KOYAMA LANE: I would like to see more involvement of actual city employees, rank and file union members, union leaders.. The mayor is the one that has been able in these last two cycles to drive all of the discussion and the vast majority of the decisions. We have work to do in terms of involving city employees, but we also have work to do as a council, in doing some priority setting together. I would love to see us to be able to give some direction, find places where we overlap as a council, as a majority, and be able to give more policy direction, budget direction. Or else what’s going to keep happening is the mayor is going to control all of it, and then we’re going to fight over some little scraps and minor details. I would like us to be able to push the mayor to involve more councilors.
So for you, to some extent, the issue is who’s controlling the budget.
The mayor can continue to do it however he wants. But we have the power to approve the budget. But we have not been able to come together enough to say, “Here’s what we want you to prioritize.” Right now we have the most pro labor council that we’ve seen. How are we giving him direction and saying, “no, we’re not going to pass a budget unless you’re really doing something serious about management bloat, you are really looking seriously about span of control.”
I’ve been proud to pass specific things for District Three, like getting our funding for the Montavilla picnic shelter, restoration of the SUN School program at Mount Tabor Middle School. I was able to get the mayor to take that cut out. He had it in his proposed budget, and I had him take it out before it even came to us. But still, those are focusing on smaller things rather than overarching, I would love for us as a council to garner more of our power and say like, “Here are our top priorities. Now we expect to see this reflected in your budget, Mr. Mayor. If it’s not, expect that we’re going to be making our own, or we’re going to be coming back with some really clear direction about places that you missed the mark.”
I could imagine that it would be a big challenge: 12 of you, and not necessarily agreeing. Looking at the budget, were there one or two things where you felt like you know you personally had an impact? You mentioned things for your district, but in terms of like citywide?
I was able to restore the strength training personal training program, which is utilized by mostly low-income
One of the things that came up this year that I’m sure our readers are divided on is the question of the Moda Center, a city asset. All of a sudden, a new billionaire comes to town and demands a huge investment. You voted “no” on the term sheet. Why was your vote the right one?
I have taken a really principled stance on this. And actually, folks who voted yes for the deal have said they’ve appreciated that I have stayed really steady and principled in this. I have said that one of my requirements is I need to see the management, the billionaire, and the owners show that they have skin in the game. show that they’re actually serious about keeping the Blazers here, and I need to see them add to the capital stack. They need to add financially. That’s something that I’ve heard overwhelmingly from constituents. So that actually made my final vote on the term sheet pretty easy, because they they haven’t been willing to add to the capital stack. I have really seen my role, and it’s been reiterated to me by the council president, that I’ve helped make this deal a better and stronger one. I told him and the mayor, hey, use me as needed in negotiations. I know how negotiations work. If you say, “Oh, I got this rank and file teacher here, this union member. She’s going to really be on my butt. We’re really going to need to have labor peace agreements in here. But we saw Tom Dundon really coming in a one-way negotiation, and we were not showing a strong stance at all. Actually, it was very desperate, like, “We’ll do anything, we’ll give you anything, no strings attached.” We saw that at the state level.
I gave cover for other councilors to start asking questions. But the main thing, as a public school teacher, as a rank and file union member, as the only one in District 3 who has kids, and my kids are in public school right now, I couldn’t not say anything. You know, to see that they chose to not lift the cap on special education funding, but then the state legislature could find money for this — it’s really not okay. It’s really disrespectful. And that term sheet actually looks pretty damn good in many ways.
You mean the city’s offer is much much better than the state’s?
Yeah, if we get everything that’s on that term sheet, that would actually be pretty interesting.
But you but you voted against it anyway.
I voted against it because I had said in the beginning I will vote against this unless they have skin in the game. No skin in the game, no Tiffany vote.
If it comes in December and we get every single thing on that term sheet, we get the rent, we get labor peace, then let’s talk.
I know that there have been conversations where the owners are very against unionization for Moda Center workers, and so I think we really need to stay strong in that. Portland’s a union town, Oregon’s a union state.
As an incumbent, what have you been hearing from labor in the last two years? What agenda have you had communicated to you by different unions?
It is similar to what I’m hearing from my everyday constituents because so many of the union members also are my constituents. I think sometimes we can think of labor as separate. They’re our neighbors. And what I continue to hear from constituents from labor is that people are struggling to get by, to pay their utility bills, to make ends meet. They love the work that they do. They love this city. They want to be able to both afford to live and work in the same place. It’s a lot of the same stuff that you’re hearing teachers talk about on the strike line just three years ago. We care about this work, and we need this job to be able to keep up with rising costs.
What is the biggest thing City Council can do for working people in Portland?
For me, being a rank and file union member who has led teachers out on strike, who understands how contracts work …. I’ve been able behind the scenes to push management to have a different stance. When I first got in, our management team filed a ULP (unfair labor practice charge) against AFSCME for doing a practice picket, It took a couple meetings, and it took other counselors kind of being like, “Oh my gosh, she’s being really intense in these meetings. But I was very clear: There’s a new group in town.
We had credited Mitch Green for that because he introduced a resolution to rescind the unfair labor practice charge that the city had filed, with the approval of the previous city council. The charge said that AFSCME Local 189’s practice picket was a violation of the contract. Are you saying you were part of that too?
Yeah. I don’t want to take credit away from Mitch.
Is it wrong to credit that particular thing to him?
I think while some counselors are maybe more bombastic or out in front, there’s a lot of usually women that are doing a lot of behind the scenes work. So, I was the counselor who was in the room pushing that deal across the finish line at the end. I was the one when the mayor and (AFSCME Local 189 president) Rob Martineau both told me, “Hey, there’s just going to be a horrible strike and it’s going to be awful.” I was like, “Absolutely not. A new council just got into town.”
You’re talking about the negotiations down the line, not necessarily the day one action? Back to my question though, what’s the biggest thing city council can do for the working people of Portland? You’re talking about labor-management for the employees of the city. Are there any “swing for the fences” ideas that you might be holding back sharing?
The next thing that I I want to work on is more protections for our domestic workers. I have a mentor in Philadelphia who’s a city councilor, Kendra Brooks, and she passed a domestic workers’ bill of rights. So I’m looking to see how we can strengthen those protections here in the city of Portland. And then I think also doing things like expanding the support and protection for our gig workers, our rideshare employees. My husband drove for Lyft for many years, and so did my neighbor. My neighbor is a refugee from Afghanistan, and he got his account from Lyft suspended and could never talk to a human about it. There are just so many ways that we could be supporting our immigrant and refugee community better — like supporting domestic workers, supporting gig workers.
Are there any particular initiatives that we haven’t talked about for your first two years that you’d want to make sure our readers know about?
Yes, I’m going to list a handful of things that I’ve passed. I’ve worked really hard and used my union bargaining bridge-builder skills to bring councilors along and get things passed unanimously, from putting our sanctuary status into code to our the LGBTQ protections package to Vision Zero safety measures like 25% of the transportation utility fee going towards safety and sidewalk infill where we don’t have sidewalks, changing the name of Cesar Chavez Boulevard when allegations around abuse came up, and that was really important to the Latino community that made that change and changed the name to Campesino, so we’re making sure that we’re honoring the movement. All of these things I passed unanimously, or near unanimously, and that is because I did a lot of the behind the scenes work of helping bring folks along, connecting them with advocates. Same with my budget amendments.
I would like to also emphasize that I am the only person that’s ever been unanimously elected to council leadership, the first vice president. As vice president, I got to lead on federal overreach, and so I played a big role in keeping us all together about a year ago, when Trump was threatening to send in the National Guard. Also I’d like to highlight that I’ve passed the most ordinances than any other councilor in the last 21 months.
