Michael Slater provides landscape design, garden management, and arboriculture services in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He serves as the president of the Salem Planning Commission, which he joined in 2021. He also serves on the City of Salem’s Climate Action Committee. Michael is also a student in the master’s program in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Oregon’s College of Design (2023-2025). In 2018, Michael co-founded the Mission Street Parks Conservancy to help care for historical Bush’s Pasture Park. He served as its full-time president through early 2021.

 

Between 1995 and 2017, Michael worked as a non-profit executive and social justice advocate. He served as president and executive of Project Vote, a national voting rights organization, from 2008 through 2017. He previously served as Project Vote’s deputy director (2007-2008) and as a program manager (2004-2006). Michael's and his colleagues' work included an aggressive litigation program to enforce the federal National Voter Registration Act, especially provisions requiring states to offer voter registration at public assistance agencies and motor vehicle departments (“motor voter”), as well as provisions to prevent unreasonable voter purges. Michael helped exposed the George W. Bush administration’s effort to illegally purge voters, which developed into a scandal that led to the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

 

Prior to his work with Project Vote, Michael was a community, labor, and religious organizer in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Ohio, and Nevada. He began his career as an intern to US Senator Paul Wellstone. 

 

Michael lives in Salem (OR) with his wife, Lori, son, Ben, three miniature schnauzers, and five chickens. He grew up in suburban Minneapolis and studied history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.