Urban Portland Deserves Better

As an accountant with government and auditing experience, I want to see Portland succeed, but Oregon's Democrat-dominated government is full of pay-to-play. In the Democratic primary, my opponents spent over $680,000 for a part-time job that pays only $31k/year. I was a lifelong Democrat, but I had to walk away from the corruption and hypocrisy that emerges when one party dominates. I saw the Democrats turn away from civil liberties and embrace war while weaponizing their base against non-issues for crony special interests.

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Oregonians know this - that is why the #1 voter registration base is Nonaffiliated. Many assume a non-Democrat can't win in Urban Portland, but the Democrat registration advantage includes independent voters who want to influence the Democratic primary. I am running as a Libertarian because in order to have ballot access, you have to organize, but I have my own independent platform and my own ideas. I plan to work with both Republicans and Democrats and find areas of common ground.

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I am running for office to give voters in this district a choice. My Republican opponent is accomplished, but he's 96. My Democrat opponent will further the same failed policies that have lead to widespread downtown vacancies, an addiction and homeless crises, and an insane tax burden.

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Unlike my Democrat opponent, I am not endorsed by the pension-mongering public sector unions, the horrific ex-Governor Kate Brown, the self-serving Trial Lawyer's Association, AIPAC-shill Maxine Dexter, and the student-harming teacher's unions. If elected to office I will work for you, not them. They don't care if downtown is a ghost town as long as they keep their gravy train of kickbacks flowing. As a former fiscal analyst at the Oregon Health Authority, I am an expert in government budgeting and administrative law, and I know exactly what changes need to be made, especially as our state government has abandoned evidence-based medicine in favor of Big Pharma.

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This district includes one of the worst superfund sites in the country, and we passed a massive parks bond that could have been used to clean Willamette cove. Instead, Metro wasted their money buying already natural land and turning it into natural land but without a tax base. Meanwhile, when Oregon is 0.02% of the planet and is a giant forested carbon sink, the state enacts "climate" policies that increase utility bills instead of meaningful projects such as a downtown rail tunnel.

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Our legislature lacks oversight and balance and mires itself in culture wars and crony special interests. We pay some of the highest taxes in the country but have some of the poorest performing public services. We graduate students who can't read, we can't provide our jail inmates with attorneys, and we throw money at health and human services programs that never seem to fix a homeless and chronic illness crisis while enriching well-connected executives. We build transit systems that have some of the worst frequencies per public subsidy dollar in the country and then slow to a crawl and then step back and wonder why people don't use them. We throw money at syringe exchanges when the best designed studies show they don't work at controlling infectious disease and that they are associated with greater substance use. We create universal preschool taxes but then create a teacher shortage because of excessive licensure requirements. All of this can be fixed.

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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different. If you want more high taxes, blight, and wealth flight, vote Democrat. If you want reform and improvement, vote for me.

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(This statement is made in my personal capacity and in no way represents official views of my employer)