Eugene weekly., March 21, 2013, Page 16, Image 16

Claire Syrett
I
REPRESENTING THE WHITEAKER
t’s a long way from the conservative Republican enclave of Ranchos Palos
Verdes, Calif., to the Whiteaker. And that’s what City Councilor Claire Syrett,
who represents Eugene’s Ward 7, likes about living there. “It’s very alive, and
it’s very connected with humanity that’s both good and bad,” she says.
Still, Syrett says she’s had to stifle a laugh when she’s heard others
describe it as Eugene’s “dangerous” neighborhood. “Compared to some
neighborhoods we’d seen and avoided in LA, it had a lot of charm,” she says
of seeing it for the first time. “Maybe it was more dangerous in the past in terms
of actual person-to-person crime, but I have to say that I’ve never felt unsafe in
my neighborhood.”
Before moving to Eugene about 20 years ago, Syrett says most of her
political thinking was on the national level, but in Eugene, a much more
personal relationship with the community and its politics got her thinking local.
After talking with friends about a potential run for office, Syrett asked
Mayor Kitty Piercy for advice, and Piercy suggested connecting with
EMERGE, a group that prepares Democrat women for elections. “At the time
she recommended that I do that, I was actually a Green Party member,” Syrett
says, “so I chose to change my party affiliation to Democrat so I could join that,
but I’ve never been a strong partisan one way or the other.”
Now that she’s in office, Syrett serves on the Police Commission, Human
Services Committee and Lane Regional Air Protection Agency, but her long-
term goal, which she is just beginning to research, is to find ways to increase
the average wage in Lane County. “We are consistently below Oregon, and
Oregon is consistently below the rest of the U.S., in terms of our average
income, yet our housing costs are not that much lower than Portland’s,” she
says. “So we find ourselves in this bind, with people who have full-time jobs
and are struggling to meet their basic housing costs.”
Syrett says that she is a feminist, although she struggled with the label when
she heard it framed as women needing special treatment. “I don’t really see it
that way so much as we have been treated differently by society,” she says. “I
think feminism means acknowledging that women deserve and should have a
place at the table equal to men.”
Buffy (of vampire slayer fame) is a feminist hero to Syrett because of “that
idea of embracing female power and taking control of one’s own destiny,” she
says. “More locally, one of my heroes was a local SEIU organizer Lucy Lahr,
who was, unfortunately, killed in a traffic accident. She was the person who
helped me become an organizer and gave me lots of support.”
In Eugene, Syrett has, among other things, worked at Jerry’s, been an
organizer (and later the regional field director) for the ACLU and is now
executive director of Lane Coalition for Healthy Active Youth, working to
prevent childhood obesity. With the ACLU, she worked against Eugene’s
downtown exclusion zone, prepared for reproductive rights fights that didn’t
materialize and got started on some anti-death penalty work.
Syrett and her husband, Davey Wendt (the chocolatier at Rye), enjoy birding
and hanging out with their two dogs in the Whiteaker. “Moving here was kind
of a leap of faith,” she says, but it paid off. “I think we both really found
community here that we love and enjoy.” — Shannon Finnell
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March 21, 2013 • eugeneweekly.com