Wrapping up 16 years of volunteer public service to Tualatin– eight on City Council and eight as mayor since 2018 – Frank Bubenik built his civic career on a simple premise: making sure city leaders truly listened to their community.
“You don’t want a mayor who’s shut in and doesn’t listen and isn’t approachable,” Bubenik said. “There are some cities that are like that, and you can see the difference.”
Bubenik and his wife, Donna, arrived in Tualatin in 1993. While sitting in the parking lot of the McDonald’s at the intersection of Tualatin-Sherwood Road and Boones Ferry Road, Bubenik saw the future.
“Donna recalls that we sat in a McDonald’s parking lot by the newly opened Tualatin Commons, that I said I would be mayor of this town one day,” Bubenik recounted during his final State of the City address in May.
Almost 30 years after his arrival, Bubenik is enjoying his last year in office and looking back on a smorgasbord of impressive feats, like establishing effective affordable housing in a city with no developable land and helping guide citizens through the uncertainties of a pandemic.
Bubenik’s involvement in small-town politics started almost as soon as he arrived. Shortly after moving from Washington, D.C., Bubenik began volunteering and working with local committees around Tualatin, starting with the Tualatin Tomorrow Advisory Committee.
“It took a while to get planted in,” Bubenik said. “I got involved with the Tualatin Tomorrow Division Projects, I was on the Tualatin Library Advisory Committee. So I started with the residential kind of things.”
Bubenik said his early involvement with Tualatin’s residential committees began to fuel an interest in being “on the other side of the dais.”
“In Tualatin Tomorrow, we’d give our quarterly update to the city council and at a certain point you’re like, ‘Ok, I’d like to be on the other side of the dais,” Bubenik said. “That’s when I said let’s flip and be the implementer instead of the suggester.”
Bubenik joined the city council in 2010 and said the switch from suggester to implementer was dramatic.
“The first few years, you’re just like, ‘Holy Crap!’” Bubenik said. “It’s a fire hose on you. Your first term is a blur… We had massive growth under Mayor Ogden, and he guided us through that, and I learned a lot from him.”
Bubenik served on the Tualatin City Council until 2018, when he won election to mayor and was sworn in. Bubenik said that when Tualatin Mayor Lou Ogden’s final term was up, he knew it was his chance.
Time as Mayor
“Lou couldn’t run anymore, and I said, ‘This is my time,’” Bubenik said. “One of the things I’ve learned from Lou that I’ve done the whole time is to make those relationships in D.C. Go to D.C., meet with your senators, meet with your congressperson, because that’s how you get the federal money back here.”
Bubenik told Tualatin Life that his first two years as mayor were largely overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and that all his preparations for the role were no longer relevant once he was sworn into office.
“It was weird, going from what I had been through,” Bubenik said. “I had these plans, and then it was just like, ‘No, forget those!’”
After recovering from the pandemic, Bubenik became a diligent advocate for coordinating with other local leaders and/or government entities to campaign for Tualatin’s needs and secure additional resources for the city. Bubenik said that this was one of his main goals as mayor and strove to make sure Tualatin was “everywhere.”
“We’re always like the little sister to Tigard, Beaverton and Hillsboro,” Bubenik said. “Mayor Ogden started it, but I took it to an extreme, where I said, ‘Let’s step up our game and let’s make it so Tualatin is going to be everywhere.”
Bubenik’s commitment to municipal participation is reflective of this idea, as Bubenik is currently a serving member on the Washington County Coordinating Committee, Tualatin Aging Task Force, Metropolitan Mayors’ Consortium, Region 1 Area Commission on Transportation, the Washington County Mayors’ group. He is the Chair of the Small Cities Consortium of Greater Portland Inc.
In 2022, Bubenik was reelected mayor.
Over the course of his tenure, Bubenik helped fund a multitude of successful city projects, including the Tualatin Parks Bond, the Tualatin-Sherwood Road Expansion, the Ibach Street Subdivision, Veterans Plaza and the Tualatin Transportation Bond.
While discussing his knack for working with heads of state on Tualatin projects, Bubenik referenced a recent seismic valve improvement project the city is currently seeking funds for.
“We fought pretty hard to get that million and a half dollars from the state for the seismic valves, and part of that is increasing that relationship with Representative (Jules) Walters and Senator (Rob) Wagner,” Bubenik said.
Another pillar of Bubenik’s approach to representing the city was listening to residents, explaining that he wanted his accessibility to be a staple of “his brand.”
“My brand to me is always be accessible,” Bubenik said. “My wife doesn’t go with me to Fred Meyer anymore because I get stopped, and I’ve always made a point to stop and talk.”
Bubenik said he tries to reflect the needs of the community through public office and even goes so far as to respond to every email he receives from members of the public.
In a Tualatin Life article, Bubenik reviewed the objectives he had laid out for himself when running for reelection in 2022, explaining that he felt he accomplished everything he set out to do, except “addressing the regional housing crisis.”
“The one that is still in motion is housing,” Bubenik said. “Between now and eight years ago, houses got tougher and it’s more expensive, and then we’ve had to deal with a lot of rules from the state that have taken a lot of our discretion away.”
Bubenik helped develop the Plambeck Gardens affordable housing subdivision, which offers 116 affordable units and, according to Bubenik, is the project he is most proud of.
Although Plambeck Gardens was a success, Bubenik said that, with many recent housing campaigns, it has been a struggle to strike a balance between maintaining affordable housing and piquing the interest of potential developers.
“You can have all these ideals and dreams, but if the developers aren’t going to work with you or the developers aren’t going to make money on the type of housing you want, they’re not gonna do it,” Bubenik said. “The other ones I think I have nailed, but the housing continues to be a challenge and it’s not just us, it’s the whole region…Next mayor has to deal with ‘Does Tualatin grow? Where does it grow?’”
Looking Ahead
While Bubenik said he was mostly looking forward to stepping away from the mayoral spotlight, he said he was also melancholy about missing out on Tualatin’s future large-scale projects.
“It’s gonna be cool to pass the baton,” Bubenik said.
Multi-year endeavors like Tualatin’s Downtown Revitalization Project, development in the city’s southwest urban renewal zone, and the Railroad Grade Separation Project were among the initiatives that Bubenik said he’d be a little bittersweet about not being part of.
“It kind of sucks that I will phase out, if you will, and the new mayor will take over, but looking forward to seeing what happens there,” Bubenik said. “I look back, and I think, in my opinion, things have gone well.”
Bubenik was planning on spending the first few months of 2027 traveling abroad with his wife in Europe. He said that his semi-retirement would allow him to ease into a less demanding schedule.
“It’s gonna be kind of cool to have all that time back,” Bubenik said. “Mayor meetings are all during the day, during the week, and there’s a crap ton of them. So it’ll be really nice to get all that time back.”
