Sean C. Morgan
Since announcing his candidacy nearly a year ago, Republican gubernatorial candidate Dennis Richardson’s message around the state has been “that we have the opportunity for a governor that will represent all of Oregon and not just the I-5 Corridor from Eugene north.”
Richardson, 64, a retired attorney and current state representative from Central Point, stopped in Sweet Home Saturday after attending the Brownsville Pioneer Picnic parade.
“I’m a governor who wants the citizens of Sweet Home to know he knows where Sweet Home is at,” Richardson said. He said he is concerned about local jobs and economy, not just Portland’s, and natural resources are part of that.
Oregon needs a governor who will go back to Washington, D.C., and fight for natural resources, he said. In Kansas, 1 percent of the land is owned by the federal government. Here in Oregon, it’s 53 percent.
He wants to make a national issue out of it, he said. Oregon is in a depression because it lacks a rational natural resources policy, “a cooperation between the state and federal government where the state has greater responsibility to manage the natural resources.”
The federal government is at an impasse as far as competent management, he said.
As a governor, he needs to ally himself with one or two other governors with the same situation, Richardson said. They need to meet with Congress and the president. That will go nowhere, but then they need to take it to the press and tell their stories, like insolvent Curry County with 60 percent of its land and resources owned by the federal government. It won’t change until citizens start pressuring Congress.
“We need to be harvesting timber, replanting timber,” Richardson said. He has talked to representatives of the timber industry, and they’re telling him they don’t want old growth.
“We want the trees that are 60 to 70 years old,” he said. “They’re the ones our parents planted.”
He said Oregon needs to remove “the barriers state government has emplaced that impair businesses from expanding.”
“Every problem that Oregon faces is being successfully solved elsewhere.”
Other states and even other countries have solved them, he said. Utah, Idaho and Texas are expanding economically, with more start-ups and more taxpayers, with less social dependency.
Oregon can be selling overseas to China and other nations where Oregonians are sending their money today, he said. “I say, ‘buy Oregon.’”
As a state representative since 2002, he has organized and participated in 11 trade missions to China with business leaders who want to sell to Chinese consumers, Richardson said, and they’ve come home with multi-million dollar contracts.
Oregon needs good jobs, he said. It has had 16 years, since Gov. John Kitzhaber’s first term, of unemployment rates higher than the national average.
More jobs mean more taxpayers, he said. “We need more taxpayers, not more taxes.”
While he is most concerned about jobs and the economy, Richardson has been an outspoken critic of Cover Oregon.
He said the state’s health insurance exchange “needs to be shut down immediately. By the end of the year, the governor and his crew will have wasted $300 million, and there is no intention to shut it down.”
Oregon has shifted to the federal government’s health insurance exchanges, but the Cover Oregon program and website remains as part of the Oregon Health Authority, which is taking responsibility for Cover Oregon customers who qualify for Medicaid.
A year before the Cover Oregon launch date, a quality assurance team reported that the project was in jeopardy, Richardson said. As co-chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which crafts the state budget, he wrote a letter to the governor saying the project was in jeopardy. He received no response. The state was $48 million into the project at the time.
Richardson eventually talked to the governor, who told him to trust the team and said he would look into it.
The problems with the Cover Oregon website are not developer Oracle’s fault, he said. Oracle has successfully designed other exchanges.
Oracle once had a hundred programmers waiting on a decision from state officials about whether names should be on line one or line three, Richardson said.
“Cover Oregon is an example of fraud, waste and abuse,” he said. Oregon has spent $300 million with “nothing to show for it.”
“We cannot afford four more years of Kitzhaber.”
Among other issues, education is huge, Richardson said. To improve education, the governor hired a new chief education officer, Rudy Crew. He resigned in July to take a job as president of Medgar Evers College in New York.
Improving education starts with principles, Richardson said. It must be equal education opportunities for all Oregonians. It makes no sense for a child’s education to be determined by ZIP code.
Decisions need to be made at the local level, he said, and money needs to follow the student.
If a school in another district is what a parent believes is best, the parent should have the freedom to send the student without moving, he said. Parents should have the ability to decide where their children go to school.
The Department of Education has a good mission statement, but it has been poorly implemented. Teachers are told how and when they’ll test.
“You don’t need a master’s degree to be a robot,” he said. “The Department of Education needs to be a resource to School Districts and not a task master.”
The burdens it places on districts are expensive and heavy, he said.
Districts should be learning from districts that are successful, Richardson said. “We do not need to just continue with mediocrity as the new norm in Oregon. We are losing a generation.”
The problem is clear, with a third of the student population not graduating, he said.
The Public Employees Retirement System also needs attention, Richardson said. The governor’s reforms last year look like they help, but all they did was lessen the increase in rates without solving the problems – a large unfunded liability.
“We need to determine what provisions are contractual, which are not, and maintain the PERS contract and adjust our budget accordingly,” he said.