The rural city of Oakridge, 40 miles east of Eugene on Highway 58, has its first contested mayoral race since 2022. To lead the city of about 3,000 residents, both candidates say they wish to bring revenue back to the city as budget shortfalls and the loss of grant funding leaves projects incomplete and residents without vital services.
Incumbent mayor Bryan Cutchen, a former U.S. Navy rear admiral, faces off against Shawn Goddard, founder of the Black, Indigenous and People of Color Art Collective, a community organization seeking to elevate and support BIPOC artists in the greater Eugene area.
Oakridge elected Cutchen to office in 2022 after a series of tumultuous governance switch-ups. The same year Cutchen was elected, former Oakridge Mayor Kathy Holston resigned from her position during her state of the city address, citing inaction and overall unpreparedness in the City Council. Council president Chrissy Hollett served as interim mayor until Cutchen defeated her by 165 votes.
Cutchen was previously the Oakridge city administrator for two and a half years, and says he’s running for re-election because he “looked at the progress we had made over the past three and a half years and didn’t want to see that either slow down or the momentum shift.” Cutchen resigned from his city administrator position in February 2022, citing a lack of trust and respect and diverging views amongst the City Council.
Cutchen says now, during his time as mayor, he’s proud of the work the city has done in regard to wildfire preparation both inside and outside the city limits, even with budget shortfalls due to the loss of a subgrant through Lane County that funded much of the work. He says the loss of funding has prevented the city from completing wildfire resilience upgrades to the city’s Willamette Activity Center.
If re-elected, Cutchen says his top priorities would be to restructure and develop a sustainable emergency medical service model, revamp city infrastructure like the wastewater treatment plant, improve public roads and continue bolstering wildfire resilience.
Oakridge has a five-year ambulance service levy on the ballot, where the city would change its funding method for EMS from a $17 per month ambulance service fee to a $1.64 per $1,000 of assessed property value levy.
“As a city, right now, we’re using our general fund to the tune of about half a million dollars to keep the ambulance service and that’s why you see the levy,” Cutchen says. He adds that Oakridge is involved in a county-wide task force that is looking at EMS services in cities that are using levies or supplementing EMS with a general fund. Cutchen says the task force has “done a lot of data collection” and hopes to see results by January or February.
Cutchen says to secure improvements to the wastewater treatment plant, the city is “going to pursue a larger grant opportunity,” to renovate the entire facility while at the same time, updating local wells.
Goddard, who sometimes spells his first name Sean, is a former student multicultural coordinator with the Associated Students of Lane Community College, LCC’s student body and retired plasterer. He says running for mayor is “an experiment, just like it should be.”
Goddard moved to Oakridge two years ago from Cottage Grove with the intent to help people raise chickens and learn rural life. He says that project did not work out, so he says he began working in a mutual aid capacity, doing direct outreach with the local community through spaces like the BIPOC Artist Collective. That’s where he says he felt people were not being heard, and decided to run for mayor.
“I’m a regular person trying to do extraordinary things for the well-being of us all,” Goddard says. “That’s what governance was designed for, to take any single common individual with good ideas and pure heart and just say, ‘I’ll try my best.’” Goddard says his priorities if elected would revolve around public safety, rural investment, addiction support and housing.
He says his experience working with the ASLCC and the Oregon Students of Color Coalition, a part of the former Oregon Student Association, helped him understand how to balance large budgets and work within governance structures. “We had the Oregon Students of Color Coalition, and that was the first time I got to oversee a budget that was close to a million dollars,” he says.
“It was at that moment that I saw 5,000 students of color and was like, ‘Wow, we’re a powerful force to reckon with if we can actually lobby and get legislation moving in the way that we see would benefit us.”
Goddard says he believes Oakridge’s homeless and impoverished population is overlooked and that the city should focus on providing social services to disadvantaged groups that are trying to survive. The 2024 U.S. Census found that approximately 23.9 percent of Oakridge’s population lives below the poverty line. There are no homeless shelters within the city limits of Oakridge, according to the Lane County Shelter Finder. Oakridge does have an intermittent warming center located at Greenwaters Park Community Center.
“There’s so many community members living, surviving, some driving, some not, amongst the forest and I don’t think those folks are heard as much,” he says. “All these people need direct outreach, someone to listen to their anguish, not their problems.”
To achieve his goals if elected, Goddard says he would spend time in Salem “banging on legislators’ doors so we can double the budgets for rural communities immediately to see what’s possible.”
To bring jobs and revenue into the city, Goddard says he would start by working with federal partners to utilize Oakridge’s position along federal forest lands to incentivize jobs in forestry, waste management and hazard reduction.
Ballots are mailed to in-state voters Oct. 14 and the election is Nov. 3. The Oregon secretary of state has urged voters to drop off ballots to ballot boxes early and if voting by mail, to send it one week before election day.