This story was originally published on LincolnChronicle.org and is used with permission.
Newport voters will decide their first contested mayoral race since 2020 when former mayor and now city councilor Sandy Roumagoux challenges incumbent Jan Kaplan in the Nov. 3 general election.
Roumagoux describes her decision to run for mayor as a “comedy of errors” because she filed when Kaplan initially said he wasn’t going to run. But after some more thought, Kaplan decided there were still things he wanted to see through in a second two-year term.
Politically, the two align on many fronts. Like the entire city council, they are advocating for the $38 million bond on the November ballot, believe in the importance of addressing the infrastructure issues and have firmly defended their response to keep an immigration detention center out of Newport.
But the two have different approaches to leadership and opposing views on council compensation, which came to a head this summer when a motion to pay councilors $300 a month passed with Roumagoux as the lone dissenting vote.
Roumagoux has stated her reasonings have to do with preserving the spirit of volunteerism with local government while Kaplan sees the move as a way to attract young and diverse people to serve on the city council.
Roumagoux
Sandy Roumagoux spends most of her time in her garage turned studio. There are tubes of oil paint everywhere, spatters on the floor, an easel and a pair of old rocking chairs. Most of her subjects are in and around Newport – the Yaquina River, the South Jetty, Beaver Creek marsh and fields of tires that make her angry.
Some of her art hangs at Hatfield Marine Science Center and the Portland Art Museum and has been a part of shows all over the world. Former president Bill Clinton purchased one of her pieces when he was governor of Arkansas, she says with a laugh.
Roumagoux was born in Yakima, Wash. and grew up on a farm outside of Corvallis that her father bought after World War II. She studied art at the University of Arkansas and was offered a tenured position to teach there, but instead decided to move back to Oregon.
“I knew in my heart I was an Oregonian and that my art would be influenced by my love of the Northwest landscape,” she said.
Now, she has lived in Newport for 43 years. Being an artist and being on city council aren’t so different, she said.
“They both use the creative process a lot,” Roumagoux said.
Roumagoux served on the city council 2011-2013 then as mayor for three terms from 2013-2019 but lost the 2020 mayor’s race to Dean Sawyer. Her four-year term as a councilor ends in 2029, so if she isn’t elected as mayor in November, she still retains her seat on council.
During her time as mayor, NOAA was eyeing locations for their West Coast fleet and settled on Newport. She’s seen packed council chambers when the city grappled whether to add fluoride to its water, which lost a public vote in 2016 and hasn’t been in Newport’s drinking water since. She is most proud of being a part of last fall’s fight against a possible detention center at the city’s airport.
She sees herself as “blabby” — she doesn’t talk much about herself — but she will talk about things she is passionate about and she is passionate about local government.
People often recognize her wherever she goes, so Roumagoux feels she has a temperature reading on how people feel about the issues the city faces and encourages their civic participation. She sees her role as mayor as being a community connector – she doesn’t want to overstep on the roles of the city manager and knows the role of mayor doesn’t have any power by themselves – it’s about the collective.
“I am so in favor of local government and how citizens have such an incredible power that many don’t realize they have,” she said. “I constantly reassure, talk about, and help people go through the process.”
If she is elected as mayor, she will hold office hours every month to be more accessible to the public and encourage more active participation at city hall.
Roumagoux believes Newport’s biggest issue is money and will continue to be since many federal grants have been cut under the Trump Administration. That’s part of the reason why she believes it’s important that voters pass the infrastructure bond Nov. 3. If it doesn’t pass, she believes there would be more outreach to explain its importance before putting it to the voters again next May.
“Infrastructure is so important,” she said. “You don’t look the other way – you can’t.”
Roumagoux believes her connections and experience with the city give her a perspective that allows her to understand Newport and its history while making decisions about its future.
“I genuinely enjoy doing the job,” Roumagoux said. “I am excited about living here. I’ve always been that way. I think Newport is just the cat’s meow.”
Kaplan
Outside Jan Kaplan’s courtyard there are rows of Nye Beach banners – he and his wife add the art to their collection each year.
“We are pretty involved with Nye Beach, I was one of the founders of the Nye Beach neighborhood association,” Kaplan said.
He grew up in The Bronx and graduated from Binghamton University in New York and received his master’s degree in social work from Marywood University in Scranton, Penn. He worked for the Tioga County Mental Health Department in New York starting as a therapist and eventually becoming that county’s mental health director.
Kaplan moved to Newport in 1999 to become the director of Lincoln County Health and Human Services. He worked there a decade before going on to be the Health & Human Services director in Curry County and as a local government liaison for the Oregon Health Authority.
Although he had left Newport for a time, he said, it has felt like home since 1999.
Kaplan’s house has garden beds filled with dahlias, sunflowers, pumpkins, lilies and other flowers. In his free time, he gardens. He also plays the bass and was a part of the local band Tsunami Zone. But he’s had to cut back on his hobbies lately, because “mayoring” has taken up most of his time, he said.
Kaplan was a council member when he was appointed mayor in 2023 after Dean Sawyer resigned after facing backlash for hateful Facebook posts.
“One of the things I’m very proud of is that I became mayor at a time when we were in chaos,” he said. “The former mayor had been posting all this horrible stuff, and it came out to the public, and many many people showed up in that city council meeting.”
Diverging from the controversy of his predecessor, Kaplan has positioned himself as a champion of diversity and inclusion.
He has moderated divisive meetings when gender-neutral bathrooms were placed in the Newport Recreation Center. In September, he reads aloud Newport’s pride proclamation and sees his vote to compensate city council members as a way to attract more diversity on city council.
“The people who want to volunteer, the people who can, those are privileged people. Some of my best friends are privileged people,” Kaplan said. “I am myself, am … but we’ve got to have that diversity to make the best decisions, and we’ve got to have people who are at the beginning of their life here, not the end of their life here.”
Like Roumagoux, Kaplan is most proud of the city’s hand in keeping out an ICE detention center.
“I think we absolutely did the right thing, there’s no question in my mind,” he said.
Kaplan believes infrastructure is Newport’s biggest challenge, which includes Big Creek’s two earthen dams that wouldn’t be able to withstand an earthquake. He’s advocated in Washington D.C. and lobbied at the state to try to secure funding to address the problem. Now, the city is considering remediation instead of the construction of a roller compact dam. The state set a deadline this year for the city to develop a plan and by 2036 they will have to fix the issue.
“We got the dam and we have the (legal fight for) the detention center. Those kinds of issues, I feel like I need to keep going. I need to do one more term.”
