PORTLAND, Oregon — The seats in Portland's newly formed city government are filling up.
On Monday, two more projected winners for the city's 12-person city council shared their thoughts and future goals with KGW.
"With this many people running, a lot of folks felt like they got to express their needs and concerns for the first time in a long time about Portland," said Elana Pirtle-Guniey, a projected winner for District 2, covering North and Northeast Portland.
"I want to make sure that folks continue to feel that," she said. "I think the most important thing is making sure that we're getting right to work no matter what it is that we take on first."
For Pirtle-Guiney, the city's top issues are clear: homelessness, substance abuse, mental health challenges and public safety. To tackle them, she believes the new city council must first learn to work well together.
"Short-term success will look like a council who gets along well, who works out challenges together, who goes to each other to work out policy differences instead of quite frankly going to (the media) first," Pirtle-Guiney said. "Press have a really important role here but that's not where we should be working out our differences."
Mitch Green, an economist, is a projected winner for Portland's City Council District 4, covering Portland's west side and some of Southeast Portland.
"I think everyone in the city is going to kind of be expecting us to rise to this challenge," Green said. "We've got to move very fast in creating a much better relationship between the county and the city so that we can be effective in tackling our homeless, addiction and mental health addiction crisis."
Once the dust settles, Green said he's anxious to take on the critical energy infrastructure hub. With enough time, he hopes to see Portlanders having re-gained faith in local government.
"If we're not successful in that, I think the city will be quite loud," Green said. "At a minimum, I'm looking to see that perception of our city has improved."
By Monday, two of the 12 seats on city council remained uncalled: one seat in District 1 and one seat in District 4. The next batch of counted votes was expected on Wednesday.