In 2017, as he was entering his senior year of high school, Rory Bialostosky aspired to continue his career in broadcasting and one day broadcast for the Portland Trailblazers.

Now 25 years old, Bialostosky took a turn in his career path and is now serving his second term as the mayor of West Linn, Oregon, making him the youngest mayor in the city’s history. He is also completing law school at Lewis and Clark College.

Starting in 2023, Bialostosky was elected as interim mayor after the previous mayor, now governor Jules Walters, resigned due to being elected to the 37th district of Oregon in the House of Representatives. In 2024, he ran unopposed and was re-elected as mayor, a position he will now serve in until 2028.

“No matter if you’re running against somebody or not, you’re just trying to go out into the community and share your vision, try to listen to people and find out what they want to see for the city, and then create a platform of ideas to run on,” Bialostosky said. “I got on [the] city council in 2020, and there were nine other people running for two seats, and I was by far the youngest. My strategy was kind of to play into that.”

On Oct. 8, the West Linn City Council will go on a council retreat to City Hall for a meeting about the city’s capital needs, like their staffing and budget.

“Council dynamics have been a problem, but over the last few years, with the current council, [we have] worked hard to make sure that everybody feels heard, and everybody has an opportunity to share their perspective,” Bialostosky said. “The overall thing we’ve been talking about is we don’t have a lot of staffing for a city of our size. Our police department [has] the lowest staff in the metro region. When you look at per capita, the story goes the same for a lot of the departments where the employees are trying to do multiple jobs, even though they’re one person.”

In the future, Bialostosky has two plans for West Linn: Vision 43 and the Waterfront Vision Plan. Vision 43 focuses on Highway 43 and its surrounding land. Since he joined city council, Vision 43 has been in the works.

“The real goal is to kind of have a vision or a plan for what the future of the Highway 43 corridor looks like,” Bialostosky said. “It’s not in really good shape right now. [The] Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) owns the road, and then some of the adjacent land uses are kind of weird. Why do we have a lot of single-story strip malls where we could have some really nice mixed-use developments with and even bring in some more housing? So we’ve been talking about the housing shortage, and how that could be an opportunity for some really nice thoughtful development along the corridor, and then hopefully that’ll bring in some money to help improve the road itself.” 

The second of the two plans, the Waterfront Vision, aims to create community elements in the waterfront area. This plan has been in the works for 10 years.

“The really exciting thing going on is the Waterfront plan, because we’ve been working with the Willamette Falls Trust who secured a historic legislative allocation of funding that’s going to go directly into West Linn’s waterfront area,” Bialostosky said “We’ve been working on this Waterfront Vision Plan, which is like setting out the community’s aspirations for the waterfront area, from the Arch Bridge all the way down to Willamette Park.”

Over the course of the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has been talking about sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon. Recently, a federal judge has blocked the deployment citing violation of the tenth amendment. In response, a group called the Metropolitan Mayors Consortium, consisting of mayors from across the region, got together and rejected the idea.

“Portland’s the lifeblood of our economy, our region,” Bialostosky said. “We all depend on a successful Portland. We all like to go into Portland when we can, when it’s safe. Portland’s not perfect. I don’t think anybody says it’s a perfect place. There’s a lot of issues that they’re recovering from, [like] the pandemic. I do think it’s getting better. There are still safety issues, but I don’t think that the calling of the National Guard is a helpful response to a situation, because it’s really concentrated in one block [in] the city.”

Bialostosky believes bipartisanship is needed more than ever, in hopes of people coming together.

“It’s just a reminder that [we] really got to try to take things back to the collaborative era, which seemed not like it wasn’t too long ago when everybody could collaborate and just speak their mind and they could agree to disagree and not be so toxic,” Bialostosky said.

While in high school, Bialostosky took Journalism for three years, where he was the live commenter and during his final year was the Sports Section Editor. 

Bialostosky recommends those who want to get involved to find advisory boards that aren’t restricted by age. One of those is Youth Advisory Council, which is held by the city of West Linn for residents to get involved, where the only requirements are be a high schooler and a part of a West Linn school.

“It’s one of the most accessible forms of government that we have,” Bialostosky said. “I mean, you have this state, federal, and local, and where can you make the biggest impact? Before I got involved, I worked a lot on parking around [West Linn] High School when I was a student, and I remember thinking, ‘I want to do something to help students.’ The city is a place where people can easily start, and we’ve seen over the years, people go from the city into higher offices.”

For a more in-depth look into Mayor Rory Bialostosky, listen to the latest episode of the West Linn Weekly Wake Up, hosted by Multimedia Editor Garrett Arendt and Copy Editor-in-Chief Clara Wood. Music by Nicholas Hull.