Jerry Baker, immediate past president of the Umatilla County Board of Realtors, moderates a candidate forum April 9, 2024, at the Pendleton Center for the Arts.

PENDLETON — The two mayoral candidates for the city of Pendleton presented their ideas for the city’s future during a Umatilla County Board of Realtors candidates forum April 9.

The forum, which also included the city council candidates, was the first event the public had to learn about the people who will be on the ballot in the May 21 primary election all at once. The last day to register to vote before the May election is April 30.

The mayoral candidates are McKennon McDonald and Joseph Hull. Whoever wins the May election will take over from Mayor John Turner in January 2025.

McDonald, 33, works for InterMountain Education Service District and was elected to Pendleton City Council representing Ward 2 in 2014. She has been president of the council for five years, and will continue in her council position if she does not win the mayoral election. McDonald also represents Eastern Oregon on the League of Oregon Cities Board of Directors.

Hull, 57, is a vice president of marketing and preconstruction and a project manager at McCormack Construction, where his focus is on business development. He also serves as president of the Round-Up City Development Corp. and the city’s Planning Commission.

Jerry Baker, the immediate past president of the local Realtors board and a resident of Athena, moderated the forum. The candidates answered three questions, which they has received ahead of time, as well as a few questions from audience.

City priorities

Baker asked the the candidates the relative priority of the city council’s goals, which focus on infrastructure, housing, communication and economic development.

McDonald said she believes they are all interconnected and did not choose a single priority among the goals.

“I’m not usually a person that’s a one-track mind,” she said. “In the role of mayor, I truly believe it’s my job to see all those individual pieces and be able to bring them together.”

Each area needs to be prioritized because otherwise, the council isn’t meeting the needs of the entire community, McDonald said. Housing affects workforce and infrastructure affects housing, and communicating with the residents of Pendleton affects everything the mayor does. All of that works vice versa, too.

“At the end of the day, we need a well-rounded system,” she said. “I think we need to be able to look at the full picture.”

Hull said something similar, with a slight focus on economic development and communication.

“I remember thinking, even then, ‘You can’t have one without the other,’” he said. He emphasized communication between the council and Pendleton residents, saying as mayor he would implement a monthly “Meeting with the Mayor” for residents to share their ideas and concerns directly with him.

He also talked about how he has noticed, in his position with McCormack, the lack of office space for subcontractors who want to have an office location in Pendleton, but have been unable to do so because there’s so little industrial property available.

Through RCDC, he has been developing a subcontractor incubator space that he said he believes will help alleviate the issue and plays into the rest of the goals of the council.

Baker also asked the candidates how to address the problem of homelessness in the city.

McDonald said she believes Pendleton has actually been on the forefront of a lot of solutions to help limit the issue, such as the city’s Right to Rest ordinance that went into effect in 2020 that other cities are now adopting and training police officers to deal with people in crisis.

She added the council could probably do a better job in communicating with the public the work it has done. McDonald noted that “advocacy and partnership are key” with local, county and state organizations.

Hull said it’s important to distinguish between “destructive behavior” and “unhealthy behavior,” and he believes there is a hard line between the two. Pendleton should be on the front lines of working with the county and the state to address the problem, he said.

The $1 million question

Baker also asked the candidates what they would do if given $1 million for the city with no strings attached.

Hull’s response looked to the future of Pendleton. He said his thoughts immediately went to allocating the money to the Pendleton Youth Sports Complex that he has been spearheading with RCDC for the past few years.

The project recently received $3 million from the state to get started, out of the expected $30 million to $35 million it will require to fully complete, and an extra $1 million would be able to move the project further along, bringing what he expects to be an “economic boom” to the city.

“I would like to see us be able to host those tournaments sooner than later,” he said. “That’s going to be like having 25 state 2A basketball tournaments in Pendleton every year.”

Beyond that, Hull said, he would like to use the money to rejuvenate Main Street, maybe even getting it designated a historic district. That designation would come with some tax incentives and grant eligibility, but also would come with restrictions.

McDonald’s answer focused more on the here and now.

She said one of the top issues she’s heard from residents has been the Pendleton River Parkway is underutilized because of perceived safety concerns. She said putting up lighting or cameras that could help address those worries would be a good use of the money so community members would feel more comfortable.

Additionally, improving the city’s swimming pool would be a worthwhile project , she said, as would an electronic reader board at the Pendleton Convention Center.

“It’s really important, at the end of the day, as a mayor, to not spend money on things that I don’t have the budget to sustain,” she said. “I think the easy thing to talk about is streets, is police force presence, in that realm, but I don’t think that’s something that we currently have in the budget right now that we could sustain at that level.”

Hull addresses conflict of interest concern

Throughout the forum, Hull’s answers often focused on economic development, either through the Pendleton Youth Sports Complex or a new project he is working on to encourage subcontractors coming to Pendleton.

However, for Hull, perhaps the most pressing question of the night came from an audience member who asked whether there could be a conflict of interest if he were mayor because of his position with McCormack, which has contracted with the city in the past.

Hull said he met with the city attorney, Nancy Kerns, as well as the city manager, Robb Corbett, and Turner six or seven months ago to figure out whether and when a conflict of interest could arise, and how that sort of conflict is handled in similar situations.

“What it came down to is there are certain points in time when I would need to recuse myself,” he said.

The council is responsible for voting to approve city contracts, and occasionally, that could include McCormack Construction. The mayor’s role in such votes is as tiebreaker, and in those situations in which he has — or could be perceived to have — a conflict, Hull said he would recuse himself. He added McCormack has only contracted with the city three or four times in the seven years he’s been with the company.

“What I promised Nancy Kerns and Robb and John that I would do is to be very open about anything that there is an overlap of influence, any perceived conflict of interest,” he said, “and I would declare that and recuse.”

Leadership approaches

One of the audience questions asked the mayoral candidates about their management style and leadership experience.

Hull said after 30-plus years of organizational leadership in construction and contracts around the Pacific Northwest, overseeing projects worth a cumulative billions of dollars, he thoroughly enjoys “building people up, building excitement, making a plan” and then figuring out how to execute the plan, and he is excited to bring that to being mayor.

McDonald said her leadership has been focused on serving the community, first as a teacher in Helix and then as a city councilor and council president.

“I think just up until recently, when Addison Schulberg joined us, I was actually the youngest councilor and the most senior,” she said. “The entire council and the mayor has shifted since I have been there.”

Those shifts have helped her develop her leadership and grow into the role she now holds, she said. McDonald said she believes the mayor should elevate the people around her and focus on the people she’s representing and working with.