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Elijah Yager seemed as comfortable admitting what he didn’t know as he was speaking forcefully on issues in his wheelhouse. Yager, 31, is the second-youngest candidate for Florence City Council in this November’s election. 

He grew up in Eugene, but has spent much of the past decade working in Texas, California, Indiana and New York. He moved to Florence three years ago to take a job with the Siuslaw Watershed Council, where he runs the education programs. 

His work puts him at the center of thinking about and talking about natural resources, but has also given him practical skills. He runs community events and summer programs, and he also writes the grants that fund his programs.  

He is running for the city council because he sees it as a civic duty. “It’s a way to give back to your community. It’s a way to be involved,” he said.  

And he thinks he’d be good at the job. “I have a lot of project management skills. A lot of moving around budgets, finding funding,” he said. He thinks the city should look for more grants, and he has experience as a grant writer. 

Naturally, he’s concerned about natural resources. “I would love to see Florence develop in a way that, you know, is mindful of all of the incredible natural resources that we have here,” Yager said. He’s a supporter of city planning that supports pedestrians and not just motor vehicles. And so he’s excited about the discussion of creating a mobility hub in Florence — an issue the city council will be considering. 

Housing is another important issue for Yager, as it is for all the candidates. The city needs more housing, but Yager thinks the emphasis should be on higher-density projects, as opposed to annexing land and “creating more suburbs.” 

High-density housing, think apartments, duplexes, smaller lots for single-family construction, puts less of a strain on city resources because the needed infrastructure is already in place and it conserves natural resources, he said. 

“People come from all over the world to experience what we have here,” Yager said, so the city council needs to be thoughtful about how to develop the city. “We should do so in a way that’s going to protect and sustain the huge economic boom that we have from our clean rivers and our forests and our beaches,” he said. 

Job creation is important for the city, but it is the area where he has the least experience and knowledge, Yager said. It is where he would lean into the experience of the other board members, and the community. “No one city councilor is going to have all the answers, and it’s really going to work best if, you know, the city council is something that is greater than the sum of its parts,” he said.

Yager believes a full-time grant manager would help the city as it struggles to keep a balanced budget. Looking for places to cut and waste to eliminate is another strategy he suggested. But he said the city is well situated to look for grants to support projects. “Florence is the jackpot for what people are looking for in applications for grants. We are a rural community. We are in an impoverished area with poverty rates and reduced lunch rates higher than the state average,” he said.  Having a large senior population and our isolation from a large metro area also works to our advantage. All of those things are exactly the things that people want to give money to when they are putting out grants.”

The one warning he offered was that grants don’t last forever. They are best used for infrastructure or projects that don’t have high recurring costs. 

Yager spoke vocally in opposition to the Flock cameras in Florence. He criticized the council for not being responsive enough to the strong opposition from so many residents. He thinks Flock, the company, is not to be trusted with the data they collect. “I think that it’s been demonstrated that Flock Security has repeatedly been untrue in their statements about what they do with their data, how they use their data, how they access their cameras.”

Yager is not opposed to traffic cameras; it’s Flock specifically that he believes is the problem. 

Housing is a top priority, Yager said, as it is for most if not all of the candidates. And in a city often judged by its divisiveness, he sees this as a positive sign. 

“We might disagree on what the best housing is, but we all want it. People want to see Florence be a place where people can bring their families and grow and thrive, and where businesses can grow and thrive. And we all want to see that, too.”