Sweet Home voters will face a broad range of decisions when they open their ballots for the May 20 election.
May elections in odd-numbered years select representatives for local districts, such as school boards, water districts or transportation districts.
In addition to electing four School Board members, residents will also have the opportunity to vote for two Sweet Home FIre and Ambulance District seats and one Cemetery District position, and will need to choose between three candidates for the Linn-Benton-Lincoln Education Service District Zone 1 seat, which represents Sweet Home (more on that below).
Also on the ballot will be five-year operating levy renewals for the Sweet Home Police Department and the library, and a proposed city charter amendment that would enable voters to elect the mayor directly.
Ballots for the election will be mailed to local voters starting April 30. April 29 is the deadline for new voter registration, but anyone who has moved within the state and simply has not updated their voter registration have until 8 p.m. on Election Day to do so and receive a ballot. Polls close at 8 p.m.
The last day to register to vote is Tuesday, April 29. Ballots will be mailed to voters starting the next day, April 30, a process that may run through May 6.
Official ballot sites in the area include Sweet Home City Hall, 3225 Main St., Sweet Home Police Department, 1950 Main St., Brownsville City Hall, 255 N. Main St., Halsey City Hall, 100 Halsey St., Harrisburg City Hall, 120 Smith St., Lebanon Police Department, 40 N. 2nd St., and Linn County Sheriff’s Lebanon Substation, 2590 Main St., which has a drop box. Ballots can also be dropped off in Room 205 at Linn County Courthouse, 300 4th Ave. in Albany, or at a 24-hour drive-through drop box on 5th Avenue, outside the courthouse.
Following is a summary of the various proposals and candidates on the ballot:
Charter Change Proposal
This proposal would amend the City Charter, which is the city’s constitution – dictating what powers it has and what the roles and responsibilities of city officials should be and how city officers are selected, to allow city voters to elect the mayor separately from other City Council members.
Under Sweet Home’s charter as it now stands, voters elect seven City Council members who are responsible for making policy and laws, directing the city manager – who oversee city staff, make budget and financial decisions, and represent citizens’ interests in city government operations.
Currently, during City Council elections that are held in November of even-numbered years, four council members are elected, the three with the most votes to four-year terms and the fourth-place finisher to a two-year term.
Under the current charter, the mayor is elected every two years by his or her fellow council members following each City Council election. The mayor chairs the council, presiding over meetings. The mayor can call special meetings, determine the order of business at meetings, appoint members of city advisory committees and boards, and is usually the individual who signs ordinances and other statements of policy decisions authorized by the council members. The mayor is a member of the council and votes as a councilor.
The proposed charter amendment would eliminate one of the seven existing council positions and replace it with a mayoral position that voters would elect every two years during the City Council election. The regular City Council members would then be elected to four-year terms, three at a time, during even-numbered years. If the amendment is approved, the voter-elected mayor’s actual responsibilities would not change – only the process of selecting the mayor.
Police and Library Levies
The City of Sweet Home is asking voters to renew the existing five-year operating levies for both departments.
The Sweet Home Public Library and Sweet Home Police Department are funded entirely by these levies, which are temporary and must be renewed for the next five years if financial support for these departments is to continue.
The reason for this is a fluke caused by Measures 47 and 50, passed by state voters in the late 1990s, Sweet Home cannot include funding for police in its permanent tax rate. That’s why our public safety levy is a temporary one and why residents have to keep voting on it.
Those measures were passed by Oregon citizens concerned about runaway spending in local governments and had the desired effect for most communities, but caused problems for Sweet Home, Linn and Deschutes counties. Had the department’s tax levy been rolled into the permanent rate as it should have been, law enforcement dollars would receive the same priority as the city’s other services, but it wasn’t.
An effort, floated the state legislators including local Sen. Mae Yee, in the late 1990s to change the law to help those communities was rejected by voters in the rest of the state.
If approved, each of the two levies would begin July 1, 2026 and run through June of 2031.
The police levy would tax Sweet Home landowners $7.85 per $1,000 of assessed value. It would produce an estimated $23,610,236 over the upcoming five years, depending on the effects of compression, early payment discounts and the collection rate.
Compression is a property-by-property calculation that affects Sweet Home’s ability to charge and collect taxes, based on the effect of other local levies, such as Linn County Sheriff’s Office’s levy, which also appears on Sweet Home property owners’ taxes. Compression can affect how much money the city gets from the property tax revenue paid by local landowners. Due to Measure 5 limitations on property tax rates, police and library funding can be reduced to meet those requirements.
The library levy would tax Sweet Home landowners $1.17 per $1,000 of assessed value on properties within the city’s borders. It would produce an estimated $3,520,579 over the next five years, starting with $665,774 in 2026-27 and increasing incrementally from there.
Sweet Home Special District Elections
Two seats on the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District Board of Directors are open.
SHFAD serves a population of about 19,000 people over 152 square miles, Both incumbents, Rob Younger in Position 4 and Dawn Mitchell in Position 5, are running unopposed. The board governs the district, which covers an area stretching roughly from Crawfordsville and Santiam Terrace to the west and McDowell Creek to the north, east and south to the county border.
Mitchell, a Cascadia resident, has been a board member since 2006. She has worked in banking, as a bookkeeper and as a real estate broker before becoming director of the Sweet Home Senior Center and the Linn Transit bus system.
Younger, of Sweet Home, is retired as a coach and teacher at Sweet Home High School, and is currently director of the Oregon Athletic Coaches Association. He was a volunteer with the fire district from 1984 to 2007, then was elected to the board in 2020.
Jami Snyder is running unopposed for Position 1 on the Sweet Home Cemetery District Board of Directors. Snyder is an incumbent, having replaced Laura Mather, who stepped down mid-term. She operates Sweet Home Florist.
The district manages four cemeteries in the Sweet Home area – Gilliland (off 50th Avenue), Lewis (on North River Drive next to Foster Lake), Ames (located on the south end of Sweet Home off Hwy. 228) and Liberty (on Liberty Road).
Three board members, each of whom serve a four-year term, govern the district, which is managed by a superintendent hired by the board.
LBL Education Service District Election
The Linn-Benton-Lincoln Education Service District is made up of 12 school districts stretching from Lincoln County to Sweet Home to Alsea. . It provides a wide range of services that cover many aspects that local districts cannot afford to do for themselves, from special education and personnel development for schools to digital and computer services, to support for needy students and their families.
Sweet Home is in Zone 1 of the district, together with Scio, currently represented by Jean Wooten of Scio, wife of former County Commissioner Cliff Wooten. She is stepping down.
Three candidates are vying for her seat: Edward DeWilde of Scio, William R. Hays of North Albany, which is also part of Zone 1, and Caleb Schneider of North Albany.
DeWilde, according to his election filings, is a professional civil engineer and land surveyor, with more than 30 years of experience in those fields. He earned bachelor degrees in both civil and forest engineering from Oregon State University and is an elected member of both the Scio School Board and the Scio Historical Society Board.
Hays is a retired United Methodist minister who currently serves as treasurer on the board of the Chamberlin House, an Albany-based residential program serving individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. According to his election filings, in addition to pastoring churches in both Oregon and Idaho, he has also worked for the U.S. Postal Service in Lebanon and has been a special education bus driver for the Greater Albany school district.
He has accounting certification earned at Oregon STate University, and is a graduate of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and Lewis University, earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration at the latter.
Schneider works as an office manager and, according to his election filings, has experience as a program manager, management analyst, customer service specialist, public works safety officer, field oversight inspector and as a math and science tutor.
He has a master’s degree in public administration from Golden Gate University and a bachelor’s in environmental science from California State University Monterey Bay.