About Steve
Steve Novick has spent the last two-plus decades fighting for progressive causes that matter to Portlanders. Steve has held big polluters accountable; defended Oregonians from Bill Sizemore’s attacks on education, health care and services to seniors; helped elect progressives; found innovative ways to let people know where their tax dollars go; and fought waste in the Oregon Lottery in order to get more money for schools.
Steve was born in Newark, New Jersey (the only other state with no self-serve gas) in 1963, and his family moved to Cottage Grove, Oregon in 1973. When the Cottage Grove schools closed temporarily in 1976 due to the failure of a local budget, ninth-grader Steve began riding into Eugene each day with a professor who lived in his neighborhood to attend classes at the University of Oregon. After a semester, Steve was allowed to enroll in the University's Honors College. When he graduated in 1981, the Eugene Register-Guard wrote of the 18-year-old: "Harvard Law School doesn't make a habit of accepting junior high school dropouts, but in Steven Novick's case Harvard has made an exception."
After working briefly for New York and San Francisco law firms, Steve joined the Environment Division of the United States Department of Justice. There he brought numerous successful lawsuits for violations of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Perhaps his greatest success was serving as lead counsel on the notorious toxic waste cleanup at Love Canal. Steve and his team secured a $129 million settlement from Occidental Chemical to cover the cleanup. Announcing the settlement, Attorney General Janet Reno said, "Today we celebrate a transformation of an environmental disaster called Love Canal into a success story .... It [the settlement] stands for the principle that when people make a mess, they should pay to clean it up."
In 1996, Steve returned to Oregon. Two years later, as chief of staff for the Oregon Senate Democrats, Steve helped them pick up three additional seats. Willamette Week proclaimed him one of the behind-the-scenes “winners” of the 1998 election. In his next role, as the executive director of the Center for Constructive Citizen Action, Steve spearheaded the successful fight against Sizemore's Measure 91, which would have cut the state budget for schools, health care, senior services and public safety by more than 20 percent.
Steve has long believed in the importance of letting people know where their tax dollars go, and in the mid-00’s, he joined Citizens for Oregon's Future, an organization dedicated to providing taxpayers useful, reliable information on tax and budget issues. Steve developed an innovative "balance the state budget" classroom exercise used by Portland, Salem, Creswell and Springfield high school teachers to help students learn about the state budget.
Steve has also been a vocal critic of the Oregon Lottery's wasteful practice of overpaying video poker retailers. He led the campaign to force the Lottery to change its policy of paying bars and taverns a huge percentage of lottery dollars simply to allow machines to sit on their floors. The result: more money for our schools and economic development.
In 2008, Steve ran for the United States Senate, losing the Democratic primary to now-Senator Jeff Merkley by three percentage points, while winning the cities of Portland, Astoria, Lake Oswego and Corvallis. After the primary, Steve campaigned hard for Jeff, helping him defeat Republican Senator Gordon Smith.
Currently, Steve works for the Oregon Health Authority, looking for ways to simplify and streamline the application process for Medicaid, and help the state prepare for the Medicaid expansion that President Obama’s health care reform bill scheduled for 2014. Steve has spent some of his time at OHA borrowing good ideas from Medicaid officials in other states; he fully expects to spend some of his time on the Portland City Council borrowing good ideas from other cities. At other times, Steve has acted as a community organizer of Medicaid officials around the nation, working with colleagues from other states to develop questions and suggestions for the Obama administration on how to implement health reform.
Steve was a member of the Board of the Oregon Environmental Council for over a decade and served on the Program Committee of the Portland City Club. He lives in the Westmoreland neighborhood with Rachel Philofsky, a public policy researcher and analyst. They enjoy walking around the city, watching The Colbert Report, and playing tetherball.
