Story Next Door: Young political junkie dives into Corvallis politics – Corvallis Gazette Times

“My Dad likes to take credit for my political involvement. I sat in the back and played Gameboy,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd was student body vice president in high school, which earned him the “student” seat on the school district board. But unlike board members the student essentially was on for just one year.

“Every single year a new person would be the VP,” Shepherd said. “It was hard for them to get to know the student.”

His political involvement hit full throttle during the 2016 presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“It was the first time I was eligible to vote,” Shepherd, “and the Sanders campaign got people involved. It was also the first time I saw politicians as people.”

He’s seen a lot of them since then. After the 2016 election he began regularly attending Corvallis City Council meetings. He attends virtually every mid-valley town hall of elected officials such as U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, state Sen. Sara Gelser and state Rep. Dan Rayfield.

He recently started work taking minutes for three city of Corvallis advisory boards and talked his way into an appointment on the city’s Budget Commission, which includes the nine councilors and nine community members.

Shepherd says he is 2/3 of the way into a cover-to-cover reading of the city budget. Along the way he has learned that, demographically, half the people in town are 27 or younger.

Shepherd astutely noted that there weren’t a lot of people that looked like him on the city’s boards and commissions. The Library Advisory Board has a mandate to have a student representative, while the Community Relations Advisory Group, which looks at issues involving Oregon State University and the neighborhoods, has designated spots for an Association Students of OSU as week as Greek life and Linn-Benton Community College.

But in recent times the only twenty-something on a city board, said Mayor Biff Traber, has been Harrison Schreiber, a Crescent Valley High School student who served on the city’s Community Involvement and Diversity Advisory Board.

Shepherd’s youth was one of the reasons Traber, who appoints the members of city boards and commissions, reacted favorably when Shephered pitched him for a spot on the budget panel.

“I have been interested and open to appointing younger members to boards as part of my efforts to increase the diversity of the boards,” Traber said. ”My minimal goal is to respond to interested young applicants who bring perspective and qualifications. Part of appointing Gabe is based on his existing familiarity with how the city operates and his educational background.”

Shepherd graduated with honors in 2018 from OSU with an industrial engineering degree. Which on the surface doesn’t sound like it would lead to positions in politics.

Shepherd disagrees.

“Industrial engineering is concerned with logistics, efficiency and data, and I love data,” he said. “It’s about taking a close look at a problem and finding an efficient solution. Government needs more efficient solutions. I can take these skills and apply it them to government. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to be on the Budget Commission.”

Shepherd did his homework first, talking with a pair of councilors before pitching his candidacy to Traber.

The Budget Commission starts meeting early next year. One idea Shepherd has is empowerment grants for green projects, which would be similar to the current neighborhood and community empowerment grants that the city funds.

“I wrote this term paper on how to get millennials to vote,” he said, “and millennials respond when candidates talk about climate change. I want to make sure the Budget Commission looks at spending through that lens.”

Shepherd still is working on his future plans. “I would like to stay in Oregon and the valley,” he said. “I could probably get a good engineering job in Portland, but I’m not a big city guy. I grew up in a small town and Corvallis is a good-sized city for me. I love the green and I love the rain.

“So I am not entirely sure what I will be doing … and then there is what I want to be doing and what I want to be doing that pays the bills.”

In the meantime Shepherd notes that he can name all 100 senators in the current Congress and has wall maps of the U.S. with the states painted red or blue depending on their political tendencies.

“My girlfriend thinks this is weird,” said Shepherd.