Megan Perkins and Nick Cerveny are running for Seat 3 on the Bend City Council.

Perkins rose to a leadership role in her first term on the City Council by spurring the city’s involvement in addressing the homelessness crisis and other issues. She is seeking a second term amid a challenge from Nick Cerveny, a brewery engineer and veteran who aims to limit spending and scope of the city government and add a new voice to the council.

Perkins said a second term would allow her to build on the City Council’s work after facing challenges like the pandemic and housing crisis during her first term.

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“I think we have set the table for some significant change and alleviation of a lot of the tough times we’re all going through when it comes to housing and homelessness in our community.”

Cerveny would bring a slate of different ideas to the City Council, whose priorities have been mostly aligned for several years.

“What we’re supposed to do as a City Council is make sure the roads work, make sure the utilities work, make sure the taxes aren’t overburdening the people, so that the people can come up with the solutions,” he said. “That is what this country is founded on. When the government is involved, then you just exacerbate situations.”

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Perkins, 47, moved to Bend in 2018 with a résumé steeped with experience in the political world. She started a Facebook page that turned into a community equity nonprofit called Embrace Bend after she found her two Black children weren’t getting the support they needed.

Her children were also her motivation to run for council two years later.

Though Perkins was brought up in Boston, she was born in Corvallis to a family with roots stretching back to Oregon Trail pioneers, she said.

She received a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She worked on the John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign, the congressional campaign of Joe Kennedy, who represented District 4 in Massachusetts from 2013 to 2021, and in the governor’s office in Wisconsin before moving to New Mexico to start a family.

Perkins has served as the City Council’s representative on the Coordinated Houseless Response Office, a multiagency board dedicated to aligning homelessness projects and funding.

She attributed city partnerships with service providers to create more shelter beds and low-income housing to Bend’s slight decline in homelessness in 2024, down about 5%, according to the Point-in-Time Count. Homelessness increased countywide from 2023 to 2024.

“It’s a sign that what we are doing is starting to work,” she said.

One of her top priorities, she said, is creating more subsidized units for people who work full-time jobs but have to sleep in shelters or on the streets at night. The same goes for people who make too much to qualify for subsidies but not enough to buy or rent a home.

According to city of Bend data, the average multifamily unit rent in Bend is $1,800, far above the affordability level for waiters, teachers, cashiers, truck drivers and others.

“We need to fill that gap with as many multifamily units that we can produce and break down any barrier that we’re seeing from either a code standpoint or incentives standpoint so that we can get more people into these multifamily units,” Perkins said.

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She said another priority is increasing safety for kids on their way to school, either by filling in sidewalks, creating bicycle groups and safer nearby roads.

As for funding the city’s larger transportation system, Perkins said it will take an additional source of revenue to fulfill needs in the coming years, and a local gas tax is a possible option.

She said passing the Transportation Utility Fee earlier this year, which tacked a $4 to $6 monthly charge onto the utility bills of Bend residents, was a difficult but necessary decision.

Cerveny promises to limit spending

An engineer by trade, Cerveny said a principle from his profession reflects his philosophy on city government: “Remove everything until it no longer works” and go from there.

He said Bend is spending too much and attempting to tackle too many different initiatives to be effective.

“In an ideal world, we have a very basic city government that does not have any political bias,” said Cerveny, who called himself an independent. Most of the current council has been endorsed by the Democratic Party.

“Right now it’s a very politically-biased council,” he said.

Cerveny was born and raised in Springfield, Illinois. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred during his senior year in high school and spurred him to enlist in the military. He spent a year as a generative mechanic and three as a pilot split between Afghanistan and Honduras.

He returned home to the Midwest to be with his young son and later moved to Bend in 2016 when his wife got a job working for the state. He continued with his real estate photography business. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was laid off from his job as a health and safety worker at a Redmond manufacturing facility. He then started a new business venture building homemade hand-washing machines for businesses around Bend.

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A few years ago he received a degree in engineering systems at Oregon State University-Cascades. Since 2022 he’s worked as a controls engineer at Deschutes Brewery.

He said many of Bend’s problems could be solved by a rollback in city government.

That includes homelessness, which Cerveny said he would address by doing away with the city effort dedicated to homelessness solutions and leaving the work up to nonprofit service providers.

Two employees within the city’s housing department are dedicated to homelessness by supporting nonprofit service providers and coordinating efforts to create shelter opportunities, but the city itself does not provide homeless services. The city has facilitated three shelters and developed a safe-parking program in the last few years.

“We have a lot of nonprofits that are able to do this work,” he said. “We don’t need to have an office within the city government.”

He would focus instead on increasing efficiency in the city permitting, which he said would spur development, reducing homelessness and lowering the cost of housing.

Also to address the housing issues, Cerveny said he would advocate to the state Legislature to change urban growth boundary rules that he believes have added to housing scarcity and cost. He said he does not support major vertical urban growth, but sees opportunity to build three-story apartments in the middle of town above outdated commercial spaces. Significant housing opportunities lie on rural land, he said, for people to live in cheaper manufactured homes with self-sufficient sources of power and water.

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“I want to see county development, rural development, things that are very low impact,” he said.

Cerveny said he wants to make the city’s budget easier to understand, especially when it comes to transportation. He said funding road maintenance could have been accomplished through the city’s general fund without a new transportation utility fee.

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The city has reported an $82 million maintenance backlog that will result in slowly declining pavement condition without additional investments.

“What we need to do is spend money and make sure our roads don’t get into a state of decay,” Cerveny said.