Jim Lee is a regular visitor to city council meetings, frequently encouraging leaders to improve the quality of the city's publicly-owned venues.

00:28 Jim talks about art that's affected him.
"In 1995 I was in Ferrara, Italy, giving an acoustics paper at a convention. Ferrara has a provincial opera house that dates from the 1790s. They put on Mozart's "Magic Flute" for us. A period opera in a period house. Period instruments. That absolutely blew my mind."

03:30 On his vision for Portland and its arts and cultural landscape in the next five years?
"Portland needs a world-class symphony orchestra,world-class ballet, world-class opera."

08:54 On RACC’s budget?
"It's partly because of the mess-up we've done with the Coliseum, we do not have enough operating funds for other artistic facilities."

13:00 On priorities if Jim were elected and named to oversee the city's arts portfolio
"Increasing the funding, getting Memorial Coliseum back into an operation where it provides operating funds. That's things you can do."

15:30 On housing issues.
"In my neighborhood, Southwest Woodstock, we've seen a lot of tearing down of old houses… They will tear one down and put up two slot-houses….the whole financial situation now is set up to benefit high income-earners."

19:25 On rising costs for commercial real estate.

23:15 On ensuring equity in the arts

29:00One place in the city Jim wants to work on.
"Washington High School. It happens to be the high school that educated the world's only two-time solo Nobel Laureate winner — Linus Pauling….I'm wondering why given we can claim this tremendous scientific character, why we can't use this high school — call it the Ava and Linus Pauling High School for the Humanities and put arts in there and sciences."