In the short term, making up for budget shortfalls caused by Federal legislation is the most important issue. I’d like to change corporate taxes from shoreline to worldwide combined reporting, which it was until 1984. That will bring in a few hundred million dollars a year, according to Oregon Center for Public Policy.

Medium term, the most important issue is education, in funding our schools well to give our children better opportunities and make employers want to come here to hire Oregonians. I’d like us to fund all unfunded mandates, and remove any mandates we can’t fund.

Long term, the most important issue is the environment. Global heating will wreak havoc on every farm. It will flood every coastal city in the world in a century unless we take action now. Let’s build on HB 2021, adding a requirement in the law for utilities to retire renewable energy certificates.

Broader than specific issues, one policy change I’d like to explore is process improvement, possibly forming a process improvement committee. This was the heart of my professional career as a software engineer. There is a Continuous Improvement Advisory Committee working with the Oregon Transportation Commission. I’d like to explore creating a similar committee with broader scope to examine longer-duration, multi-step and especially multi-agency processes that people and companies have to navigate.

The committee would interview representatives of each role involved in a process and design solutions with each role in mind, whether a route though the process was horizontal vertical, or zigzag, and make it coherent and optimal.