Henry Balensifer, Warrenton’s mayor since 2017, starts another term
The Skipanon River in Warrenton. Photo: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Henry Balensifer III will be Warrenton’s mayor for another term. He ran unopposed on Nov. 3, after the only person who filed against him turned out to live in Ilwaco, Wash., and was ruled ineligible. Unofficial results gave Balensifer 2,043 votes, The Astorian reported.
That makes him one of the longest-serving mayors on the North Coast. He was appointed in 2017 to finish the term of Mark Kujala, now a Clatsop County commissioner, then won election in 2018 and again in 2022. Before that he was elected to the Warrenton City Commission in 2012, at 23.
Balensifer is Warrenton born and raised, and his family’s history runs through the river. His father, uncle and cousins are or were Columbia River pilots. His grandfather ran boats for the Oregon State Police, and his great-grandfather was a merchant mariner. His grandmother was a Warrenton mayor. He told The Astorian last year that he’s “the first male in my family for multiple generations that didn’t go into the maritime industry.” He works instead in aviation, as a senior sales accounts manager for general aviation and military aircraft at Oshkosh AeroTech in Warrenton.
A fish hatchery in high school
In his 2025 profile in The Astorian, Balensifer described a childhood marked by severe bullying and, later, a back and pelvic condition that ended his sports career and kept him out of the Naval Academy. As a teenager he interned with the Youth Conservation Corps at Fort Clatsop, worked as a park ranger at 16 and spent nine weeks with the Navy Sea Cadet Corps at the Cape Disappointment Coast Guard station.
The project that pulled him into public life came his sophomore year. With the principal’s blessing, he set out to restart Warrenton High School’s fish hatchery program, started a nonprofit to fund it and raised about $250,000. His grandmother connected him with then-state Sen. Betsy Johnson, who helped with fundraising and with getting the Oregon National Guard to help build the hatchery. Much of the student labor came from kids working off detention, including one of his former bullies, who became his “right-hand guy.”
“Getting involved with the National Guard and my state senator, that’s where my politics started,” he said.
A college mistake he talks about
Balensifer doesn’t hide the low point. As a student at George Fox University in 2008, he and other members of the college Republican club hung an effigy of Barack Obama from a campus clock tower, an incident that drew in the FBI and Secret Service. He was the first of the group to turn himself in, was suspended for a year and went through diversity programs before returning to finish his degree in political science.
“The consequences were very public, and they were very painful, and I owned it all,” he told The Astorian. He said he went back to George Fox because he had hurt people there and needed to make amends, and that he doesn’t think he’d be the person he is without having lived through it. The episode followed him into his first council race in 2012 and has come up since.
How he runs the job
As mayor, Balensifer has leaned on regular Facebook Live updates to explain what the city is doing. “You’ve got to lead from the front, and you also have to communicate what you’re doing,” he said. Warrenton has been one of the faster-growing places in Clatsop County, with new housing, retail along U.S. 101 and constant pressure on roads, water and sewer, so much of the job is managing growth in a town that still thinks of itself as small.
He tends to show up in person, too. Last fall he ran his first 5K, the Trick-or-Trot benefiting the Warrenton Parks Alliance, at the urging of his wife, Kelsey. “You can pretend to care,” he said. “But you can’t pretend to show up.”
He has also said he doesn’t see himself in elected office 15 years from now. He could picture serving on a state or local board, going back to the planning commission, or mentoring people who want to run. “I view myself as helping up the next cadre of people,” he said, “and helping them not to make the mistakes I did when I first started.”
Warrenton’s other contested race this year went to incumbent Commissioner Paul Mitchell, who led Grant Lehman for Position 4. Voters also approved a measure setting the city’s marijuana sales tax at 3%, the maximum state law allows.
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