I want to secure your rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for you – today, tomorrow, and far into the future  – whether you’re urban, suburban, or rural.

I’m running because I care about all Oregonians. I’m running because I know what it’s like to live in rural Oregon, with the many logistical challenges it presents with water, electricity, Internet, and roads; the last three miles of my road to get home are gravel. I rely on a well, a septic tank, and a furnace that burns heating oil from a 250 gallon tank. On January 16, I paid $2.98/gallon. On April 1, I paid $5.88/gallon – almost twice the price. I bought 675 gallons in the last 12 months.

I still have a land line because cell service isn’t reliable and stopped altogether last summer when the Verizon tower in Buxton failed. And I’d rather keep my 200′ tall Douglas-firs and western red-cedars that block Starlink from working.

I’m running because everyone needs skills and knowledge of their choosing to be healthy, happy, and successful, no matter the path they choose. We the People are responsible to facilitate it with STEM, vocational, and technical programs, and with access to childcare for all Oregon families. Unfunded mandates need to be phased out or funded, since they harm every other school program.

I’m running because I want America to be one person, one vote – not one dollar, one vote. I’m running because I see so many flesh-and-blood people hurt and neglected by GOP policies favoring corporate “people.” Corporations are all about quarterly returns and nothing about the future of our children, our land, or our water. Economists call those futures externalities – beyond the corporate cost/benefit analysis that makes the next generation not even worth a dime of today’s money. That’s why we need to tax and penalize corporations, to change their calculations.

Corporations are a legal fiction that privatize the gains and socialize the losses – polluting water, heating the air, and ignoring the long-term consequences of everything via net present value calculations. In a completely free market, corporations wouldn’t even exist. They must be regulated. The freedom we grant them must be balanced with responsibilities by our government, as has been done so with the NEXT Renewable Fuels refinery at Port Westward.

For a rural district like ours, I want us to fund a transportation system that lets you get from home to your favorite city center, and for people in urban homes to get to jobs in our district. I want a transportation plan where everyone pays their fair share for maintenance.

Corporations are made for a short-term, linear world. They and their owners must be balanced by we who think about the long term, about turns that the universe could put us through. A clean energy infrastructure is vital to our survival, and the time to make it happen is now. If we don’t stop global warming soon, we’ll melt the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, raising sea levels by 16 feet. If we wait until it starts breaking loose, we won’t be able to stop it. The time to act is now.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone off Oregon’s coast last quaked around 9 PM on January 26, 1700. It has quaked 41 times in the last 10,000 years. Less widespread but still catastrophic are the Gorge fire of 2017 and massive 2020 wildfires, hurricane-level storms like the Category 3 Columbus Day storm in 1962, and other black swan events: extremely rare, unpredictable occurrences with a massive, transformative impact. I’d like us to be prepared.

I’m running because, as a Democrat, I want us to oppose each and every GOP officeholder with their archaic, plutocratic, and reactionary policies. I want us to oppose turning back the clock to when Jim Crow segregation  still existed, when women needed men’s signatures for house loans or credit cards, and when non-White people were barred from immigrating.  I want to follow our current Golden Toilet Age, which echoes the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, with a new Progressive Era like the one of the early 1900s. Let’s do it!