Measure 2-159 would reduce the Corvallis City Council from nine councilors to six, increase their terms from two years to four, and limit councilors and the mayor to three consecutive terms. The Advocate has endorsed against this measure. Below, two voices we respect come out in support, Ward 1 City Councilor Jan Napack and regular Advocate commentator Curtis Wright.
From Jan Napack, Ward 1 City Councilor
The Advocate’s editorial board makes a forceful case against Measure 2-159, and I share its concern about fair representation. But its claim that the measure makes gerrymandering “practically inevitable” rests on a
misunderstanding of Oregon law. Voters deserve an accurate picture of the rules before deciding.
State law sets the rules for drawing wards
Oregon does not leave ward boundaries to whichever group holds a majority. Under Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) 246.410, local governments that draw districts based on population must follow directives issued by the Secretary of State after each census. That’s a legal requirement, not a suggestion.
Those directives require districts to be as equal in population as practicable, contiguous, and attentive to existing
boundaries, communities of common interest and transportation links. They also prohibit drawing districts to favor a political party or incumbent, or to dilute the voting strength of language or ethnic minority groups.
The Advocate’s Endorsement is right that state rules set a minimum, and cities can add their own. But a minimum that already prohibits partisan and incumbent-protection maps is hardly “wiggle room that practically invites abuse”. The charter language in Measure 2-159 would remove duplicate protections already imposed by state law. The city attorney has said the same. Removing a repeat of a rule does not remove the rule.
If Corvallis wants additional standards, for example, an economic-justice lens for future maps, the Council can adopt them by ordinance in public, giving residents opportunities to weigh in.
The map comes after the vote
The editorial says it “would not have been tough to write a boundary setting process into this Charter amendment”. But doing so would circumvent the boundary setting process that already exists in Chapter 3 of the Charter. That essential process follows Oregon Law, including ORS 246.410 and the Secretary of State’s Directive 2019-1. Setting ward
boundaries is also a public process subject to the Oregon Public Meetings Law (ORS 192.610 to 192.710). Indeed, the same path to setting ward boundaries has been followed by every Corvallis City Council, along with extensive public input, since the 1948 Charter. Clearly, it would be unwise for the City to advance an unvetted boundary setting process as a precondition to deciding whether there will be six wards. The number of wards comes first; the map follows.
If Measure 2-159 passes, the six-ward map is expected to be adopted by ordinance after public hearings by the end of 2027. The new arrangement would not take effect until 2028. It is reasonable to be skeptical of public processes but the City must abide by the state’s legal standards, which again and most importantly, requires public participation.
Fewer seats don’t automatically mean less democracy
Today, each Corvallis councilor represents about 6,700 people and 2,600 households. Under the measure, that would
rise to about 10,000 people and 4,000 households per ward. That’s a real change, but it does not by itself tell us whether residents will be less represented.
Six-member councils are not unusual in Oregon. Albany, Beaverton and Springfield each have six councilors; Eugene, a city roughly three times Corvallis’s size, has eight. Corvallis’s current combination of nine wards and two-year terms is unusual. The measure would move the city closer to what cities use elsewhere in the state; and there is no evidence to suggest that they experience problems with maintaining a functioning democracy.
The even number of councilors is another concern in the Advocate’s endorsement. A tie would occur only if the Council split evenly, and the mayor, the one official elected citywide by voters in every neighborhood of the city, would cast the deciding vote. In the past two years, the Council had only three split 5–4 votes; most decisions were made by larger margins. That doesn’t prove ties will never matter, but it does suggest they are not likely to decide most Council business.
Consider what the current system produces
The measure’s supporters argue that the current system creates frequent turnover. According to the task force that
recommended the changes, 14 of the last 19 elections brought four or more new people onto the Council. That can mean repeated training, and loss of continuity and institutional knowledge, for both councilors and city staff.
There is also the question of contested elections. The task force reported that more than half of general elections over the past three decades had only one candidate. A system with frequent elections does not necessarily give voters more choice if many races go uncontested. And bigger wards have the potential to provide a larger pool of candidates.
Four-year terms don’t eliminate accountability
The Advocate’s concern about underperforming councilors is understandable. But it also says the three councilors it describes as unresponsive have all decided not to run again. That may be evidence that public scrutiny already has an effect, not that four-year terms leaves voters powerless; indeed, voters retain Oregon’s recall process for elected
officials. The measure would also add term limits: councilors and the mayor could serve no more than three consecutive terms. No one could hold a seat indefinitely.
Four-year terms prioritize stability and efficiency and they also give new councilors more time to learn the job and work through complex issues and prior council actions before campaigning again. The terms would be staggered, with half
the seats up every two years. That means the Council could retain some continuity while voters still have regular opportunities to make changes.
How the measure was developed
Measure 2-159 came from a Charter Review Task Force made up of three community volunteers, three councilors and the mayor. The group worked for about six months, held public meetings and reached a unanimous recommendation. The Council referred the measure to voters on a 7–2 vote.
The Advocate’s endorsement is right that democracy is difficult. Measure 2-159 won’t change that. It would change how the Council is organized, with the aim of giving councilors more time to learn and do the work, while maintaining continuity and increasing efficiency, and setting limits on how long officials can serve.
Voters can reasonably disagree about whether those changes are worth making. But the claim that the measure makes
gerrymandering inevitable is political speculation rather than established fact. State law already prohibits drawing wards to favor a party or incumbent.
Corvallis voters have always been willing to look closely at the facts. On this measure, the facts point to voting yes on Measure 2-159.
From Curtis Wright, Corvallis Advocate Commentator
Few things say more about a city than how seriously it takes its democracy. Corvallis takes it very seriously — we show up, we volunteer, we argue the hard questions in public and expect to be heard. This November, we get to bring that same seriousness to the structure of the Council that governs us.
Four practical changes, one goal
The Charter amendment on your November ballot makes four straightforward changes: four-year terms instead of two, staggered elections, reasonable term limits, and six council wards instead of nine. These aren’t one person’s hunch. They’re the unanimous recommendation of the Charter Review Task Force — elected officials and community volunteers who spent months weighing effectiveness, accountability, continuity, and the long-term health of Corvallis governance, and then, to a person, agreed on this package.
This isn’t about left or right. It’s about whether the people making decisions for roughly 60,000 residents have the time, the mandate, and the institutional memory to do the job well. Both the Benton County Democrats and the Benton County Republican Party have endorsed 2-159. So have the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Corvallis Organization, our current mayor, two former mayors, five sitting councilors, a former councilor, and seven candidates running for Council. The people who know this job best — left, right, and center — are recommending this. Your YES vote for 2-159 will be in good company. And do a lot of good for Corvallis’ future.
Time to actually do the job
The Council’s current structure wasn’t built for today’s Corvallis. Housing, transportation, public safety, infrastructure, and economic development — none of these are two-year problems. They take years to plan, fund, and see through. Yet a newly elected councilor spends the first several months to a year just learning the budget, land-use law, and the rhythms of eight colleagues — and is often already thinking about re-election or quitting before that learning curve levels off. Four-year terms don’t merely double the clock. They give a councilor real time to master the work, lead on what matters, and build a record voters can actually judge.
A council that stops starting over
Staggered elections matter just as much. Under today’s system, all nine seats can turn over in a single election. In fact, the Task Force’s own review found that, on average, nearly five of Corvallis’s nine seats have flipped in every election since 1973. That’s not democratic vitality. That’s a council perpetually starting from scratch. Staggering terms keeps experienced councilors at the table when new ones arrive — the same continuity that every well-run school board, business, and nonprofit already builds in.
A three-term limit — on councilors and the mayor alike — ensures enough time to govern well and serves as a guardrail against anyone treating a council seat as a permanent address.
Fewer wards, not fewer voices
Here’s an objection you might hear: don’t fewer wards mean less representation, a councilor who’s more distant and harder to reach? I understand why opponents raise this, but I don’t think it holds. Corvallis isn’t Portland. A ward of 10,000 residents here isn’t a remote, anonymous district — it’s still small enough to walk, still small enough that your councilor shows up at the same farmers market, the same school events, the same public forums you do. Every neighborhood still elects its own councilor. What changes isn’t access — it’s breadth. Each councilor now has to earn the support of a more varied set of neighbors, which makes a councilor harder for any single faction to capture and better at citywide judgment. That’s not a smaller voice for any neighborhood. It’s a stronger, more citywide-minded advocate for all of them.
“But where’s the map?”
Here’s the objection you’ll hear most — including from this paper’s editorial page: how can anyone vote yes without first seeing the new ward map? It’s a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.
The answer is that you can’t draw a six-ward map until “six” is the law. The number has to come first because the map depends on it — not the other way around. To hand voters finished boundary lines before a single ballot is cast, someone would have to pre-draw the districts before the public’s decision. That’s the cart pulling the horse.
And when the map is drawn, it won’t be drawn in the dark. Corvallis already has a process for exactly this — it redraws its ward lines every ten years after the Census. State law and the City Charter set the rules: wards must be roughly equal in population, keep neighborhoods intact, stay compact and regular, and remain free of political bias. Those guardrails don’t vanish because the number changes from nine to six. They’re precisely what a six-ward map would be built to satisfy.
A yes vote gives no one a blank check. It sets the number — and then hands the boundaries to a yearlong public process governed by clear, published rules. If you care about which neighborhoods are kept whole, or whether every part of town, east and west, carries fair weight — and I believe we should all care about that — a yes vote is how you start that conversation.
A smaller council has to actually deliberate
Political scientists who study group decision-making repeatedly find that smaller bodies deliberate better than larger ones — lower communication overhead, sharper individual accountability, and more room to move from positional advocacy to actual persuasion.
A nine-member council tends to run on parliamentary procedure and bloc voting; members speak to the record and to their constituents more often than to each other. A six-member council can’t operate that way; no bloc of two or three is ever enough, so every vote requires real coalition work, and every member must engage with what the others are actually saying. That’s not a criticism of anyone currently on the dais. It’s a structural fact about how groups of people make decisions, and it holds no matter who’s sitting around the table.
Six isn’t the odd one — nine is
Some worry that an even number of councilors invites tie votes and hands the mayor a tiebreaker. But the mayor already breaks ties today and would under any structure; moving to six doesn’t change that role at all. And six is no outlier — nine is. Look up and down the valley. Eugene, nearly three times our size, is governed by eight councilors. Nearby Albany, Lebanon, Springfield, Beaverton, Tualatin, and many other Oregon cities all elect six councilors to four-year terms. When city staff compared Corvallis to ten similar Oregon cities, six was the most common size. And a League of Oregon Cities survey found something even more pointed: not one other city in Oregon pairs nine wards with two-year terms. Corvallis isn’t the exception because it’s exceptional. It’s the exception because no one’s fixed it. Now we can.
Better governance, better Corvallis
Corvallis is not shy about planning ahead. We plan for the next generation, not just the next election. Our Council’s structure should reflect that same instinct — not the one we inherited from an amended charter more than 50 years ago for a city a fraction of today’s size and complexity.
I’ll end where I began. Corvallis takes its democracy seriously — and this measure is democracy taking itself seriously. Better governance leads to better decisions. Better decisions lead to a better Corvallis. I hope you’ll join me in voting YES on 2-159 — for a better Corvallis.
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