Vote Mike McTernan
Hillsboro City Council
Ward 2 Position B
Who is Mike?
My path to where I am today has always been defined by a connection to the natural world.
When I worked as a chef through my twenties and early thirties I built relationships with local farmers to supply ingredients for my restaurants. I learned how people chose to grew their food mattered, not just for the taste but for the health of land and community that they relied on to live. How they saw it not just as a place to use and exploit, but to protect and cherish ensuring that it would remain, healthy and productive for generations to come.
As I transitioned away from restaurants I took a job as a school garden coordinator at a non-profit that focused on providing local produce, donated by farmers, to those experiencing food insecurity. I saw how a small group of people, with the core value that a true community comes together to make lives better for those around them, could create lasting and positive change. I worked with city officials and teachers and farmers and children to create dozens of gardens in our city. Watched how kids would light up as they tried fresh herbs for the first time or harvested a fruit from a plant they grew from a seed, or told me about the meal they helped make at home.
Now as an ecologist I get to study all the ways the world is connected. How no animal or plant or person is isolated from the world or others around them. And it is inspiring.
In the same way a diverse ecosystem is healthy and resilient I’ve learned that local farmers can create sustainable and resilient food systems for a city, that community members can create and sustainable and resilient social safety net for those who need help, and that smalls groups of dedicated individuals can create lasting and sustainable positive change all around the world.
And now, I’m hoping to prove that elected officials with help from the citizens of their city can build a sustainable and resilient community that values diversity, environmental health and equity not through compromising these values but by embracing them.
What Does Mike Believe In?
I can’t say I ever saw myself running for office, but here I am. I used to think the world was the way it was and the chances that someone like myself could make a meaningful change were small. So why the change of heart?
A few years ago, I read that the Hillsboro Airport was the leading lead polluter in the state. Since then I’ve watched the Port of Portland talk about doing something about this but never actually taking any concrete steps towards limiting, let alone banning the use of leaded fuel at its airport. I read about how Intel years ago emitted a dangerous amount of fluorine gas into our city over the course of many years and how they were not punished for this, and have recently been permitted to increase emissions. I’ve watched over the past year as the City annexed people’s land to expand the industrial zones on the outskirts of the city, turning it into a land zone for giant data center, more chip factories, and parking lots and warehouses for amazon deliveries. I’ve watched them work though back channels to approve more and more of these data centers against the peoples wishes.
I lived through wildfires, droughts, and I watch as each year is hotter than the last.
I read these things, I see these things, and I live these things and I know there is a better path. One that doesn’t compromise the health and safety of our city’s people and our environment for some additional tax revenue. That doesn’t allow industry to skirt the rules, and pass costs of their business on to those who live here.
I wonder if we aren’t squandering our opportunities to build something more sustainable, something that won’t poison or air and water and harm our health, something that can truly make our city a better place to live, not just a place to “make a living”.
So here I am. Professing the dangers of continuing with the status quo and offering an alternative to the idea that growth can continue unabated without consequence An idea, I think, and recent history has shown, is misguided and dangerous.. We are starting to run into hard boundaries on what we as people can take and more direly what the planet can take. We have to draw the line and say no more. We have to stand up for the belief that the environment is more than shopping cart we can take and take from, stand up for the belief that we are not just cogs in an economic machine, that each and everyone of us deserves clean air and clean water and a chance to be a force for good in the world.
And that is why I am running. To stand up.
