When Kaarin Knudson became mayor of Eugene in January 2025, her biggest problems were building more housing, making roads safer and closing the city’s $11.5-million budget gap. Her office has since balanced the city’s budget, built hundreds of new housing units and zeroed in on the most pressing transportation safety issues.

But aggressive immigration enforcement and uncertainty at the federal level have been a growing concern for her constituents. That came to a head most recently on Friday, after protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown escalated in downtown Eugene, leading city police to declare a riot. Federal agents deployed tear gas on protesters that evening.

Mayor Knudson joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to talk about the recent protests in Eugene and reflect on her first year in office. The following are highlights from the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.

The mayor defended Eugene police’s response to the protest on Friday

“It was a really fantastic, beautiful, powerful, peaceful protest in our city center. We had a lot of businesses in Eugene and Springfield and adjacent communities closing or dedicating their revenues that day in a show of solidarity, and you know it’s very clear that there is no place in our community for reckless federal agencies, and that ICE needs to get out.

“But what happened on Friday night was that essentially some windows were broken on the ground floor of our federal building. … Eugene police needed to step in [and] form a barrier essentially between that crowd and the federal agents who were inside that building. … The declaration of a riot occurred in that moment.

“Unfortunately, stepping across that line and the breaking of those windows really changed that circumstance. And we have to be focused on protecting people and de-escalating circumstances even when we have others engaged who are not seeking de-escalation.”

Eugene has built more housing, but affordability remains an obstacle

“We have about 4,600 people in Lane County within our dashboard and data for people who are experiencing homelessness. We know that that experience is created by there being not enough housing that is affordable to people and not nearly enough vacancies within the existing housing market.

“We permitted 413 units of new affordable housing last year, and almost 300 of those had support from our city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The city council has invested about $7.5 million in a new affordable housing building that will be about 75 units and is immediately adjacent to City Hall in our downtown riverfront redevelopment area. … We opened another 130 units of market-rate housing right across another street from City Hall. … We have another almost 400 units of riverfront housing that are essentially in the queue. … We have to actually continue to even push harder on this. [The] federal context has not made that easy. Nothing has gotten better with costs of input to housing. Nothing has gotten better with interest rates or certainty in the economy.”

The mayor is prioritizing two areas to boost transportation safety

“There are two areas where in this coming year we really need to direct our energy in a new spirit of collaboration. One is in West Eugene in our Bethel neighborhood and Highway 99. [Highway 99] really needs to be a much safer multimodal connection through the community. It connects a lot of important locations and hubs within West Eugene, so that area has to be a focus.

“The other area of work that has been heavy on my mind, especially in this past week and a half, is the interface between the University of Oregon, our main campus here in Eugene, and the gateway to our city along Franklin Boulevard and the entirety of that area. … A week and a half ago, [we] had an absolute tragedy occur where a University of Oregon PhD student, wonderful beloved member of our community, was killed while riding his bike. And that should not happen. It’s a tragedy, and it weighs heavily on me, and I think on everyone in our community who is looking at a transportation system that’s been built over 100 years and realizing that we have a lot to retrofit to make it safer and more relevant to the 21st century.”

Eugene balanced its budget, but the next years will be tough

“We were able to essentially restructure some things with our stormwater fees and our parks funding that allowed for a very small increment of increase to our local stormwater fee, which is something that was already in place, and then we made about 50% of the cuts on top of the other reductions that we’d made.

“For anyone who’s paying attention, the next couple of years are harder. We already knew that the revenue projections two years out were not as positive as the difficult ones we were looking at just last year and the year before.

“We know that our state now is in a completely different circumstance, much of that the responsibility of the disinvestment from this federal government and this administration. … There will be a lot of responsibility on public officials and community leaders to communicate broadly about the challenges and the trade-offs that we’re facing.”

Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation:

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/02/03/eugene-oregon-mayor-kaarin-knudson/