The race for the next Multnomah County chair boils down to this: Do voters want someone who will stay the course on the county’s approach to homelessness? Or do they want someone who will bring urgency and targeted strategies to confront the totality of the crisis?

We’ll choose the latter and recommend that voters do as well. And while both Sharon Meieran and Sharia Mayfield demonstrate that commitment to charge forward, our endorsement goes to Meieran, a county commissioner since 2017, for the experience she brings to the table.

Meieran, a 57-year-old emergency medicine physician, has been steadily challenging her fellow commissioners to treat homelessness as the public health crisis it has become. She has pushed for creating a range of different kinds of shelters across the county that can get campers off the street and connect them with needed health and housing services. A volunteer with Portland Street Medicine, she also emphasizes greater investment in behavioral health resources to address substance abuse and mental illness. And she has rightly panned the county for its lack of reliable data, a problem also noted last year by the Multnomah County auditor who halted an audit due to missing data and misleading information about how many people had been housed. The county is only now working with a contractor to develop the robust data collection system that Meieran has called for.

But it doesn’t take data or Meieran’s medical background to recognize the health concerns raised by our spiraling homelessness crisis. The signs go beyond trash and sanitation issues stemming from unsanctioned campsites. Rather, people are struggling with unchecked drug addiction, living with untreated mental illness and facing a spike in violence that has caused the deaths of five homeless people already this year. Then, there are the environmental threats of last year’s triple-digit heat wave and this month’s snowstorm – both life-threatening events to which the county bungled its response. The county’s most recent Domicile Unknown report showed that more homeless people died in 2020 than in any other year of the report’s 10-year history, with methamphetamine contributing to half of the 126 deaths. Remarkably, not one death resulted from COVID-19, the health threat that garnered most of residents’ attention that year.

Meieran has been a lonely voice, however. Led by Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury, who cannot run for re-election due to term limits, the county has religiously pursued a “housing first” strategy that emphasizes using dollars for rent assistance and permanent housing placements rather than temporary shelter. While the painstaking work of placing individuals in permanent housing is clearly the solution to homelessness, it does not address the urgency of what’s unfolding on our streets. The county’s 1,600 shelter beds are nowhere near enough for the several thousand homeless people who are surviving in parks, on trails, along sidewalks and in cars. And the county lacks sufficient clarity into situations where permanent housing hasn’t worked. Nearly one-quarter of the people who exited homelessness in the 2017-2018 fiscal year were back seeking services in the 2019-2020 fiscal year, according to data provided last year by the county-run Joint Office of Homeless Services. Why? At the time, they said they did not know.

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Two of Meieran’s fellow commissioners, Jessica Vega Pederson, 47, and Lori Stegmann, 62, are also running for chair. Both can tout accomplishments in their tenure, including Vega Pederson’s role in securing passage of a new tax measure to fund free preschool, which is scheduled to launch on a limited basis this fall. But neither lays out a vision for substantial change, instead offering homelessness and housing solutions that nibble around the edges of the gaping problem. Tellingly, neither would expressly champion the need for more temporary shelter. As Meieran put it, their answers were full of “the talking points of the status quo.” The ballot includes two other candidates, but neither shows the same familiarity with the issues as the commissioners and Mayfield.

While we endorse Meieran, we do so with reservations. Despite five years on the commission, she hasn’t been effective in changing the county’s direction – a shortcoming that Mayfield highlights in making her case for chair. And if voters were to decide on interviews alone, they may understandably line up behind Mayfield, a 30-year-old Gresham attorney and law professor whose clarity, specificity and conviction stood in stark contrast to the bland and hedged answers from the three commissioners. Among her concrete ideas and straightforward answers: she would seek to establish dual diagnosis centers that focus on addiction and mental health; expand funding for Project Respond, which pairs mental health workers with police; and urge the city to roll back requirements such as renter relocation payments that have likely contributed to the loss of 6,400 single-family homes from the rental market since 2015.

But as compelling a candidate as Mayfield is, she does not have the executive or elected experience critical for someone who will be leading a county government with a $2.8 billion budget and 5,600 employees. While her ideas and direct attitude are refreshing, it is a much tougher task to put solutions in action as a novice politician. While we are endorsing Meieran, we also believe a run-off election between Meieran and Mayfield would sharpen both campaigns.

Certainly, the county’s responsibilities extend far beyond homelessness, but there can be no greater priority for the next chair. Residents should vote with that in mind.

-The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board

For all the editorial board’s endorsements, go to oregonlive.com/opinion.