Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Dan Thackaberry of Lebanon is the Democratic candidate for state House District 17.
He faces Republican challenger Fred Girod, a dentist from Stayton, in the Nov. 7 election. The winner will succeed Rep. Jeff Kropf, who dropped out of the race after the primary in May to continue his career as a radio talk show host.
Thackaberry grew up in Lebanon, graduating from Lebanon High School in 1974. He also works his family farm in the Lebanon area. In college, he studied entomology at Oregon State University and worked briefly for a consulting firm as a field man.
Thackaberry has served on the Lebanon City Council for about eight years.
“This has been a lifelong ambition,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in politics. It started in the classroom. He was involved in student government at OSU.
Eight years “is long enough for one person to be in one place,” he said. While on the council, he helped land the Lowe’s Distribution Center.
“It took a while to get the ducks in a row,” he said. He said a the necessary staff members needed to be assembled and things had to start moving in the right direction, but that’s what allowed the city manager to sit at the table and begin negotiating with a council that would back him up.
Thackaberry also was involved in the Walden project, a plan to build the city’s wastewater treatment plant in wetlands the city purchased for this purpose. In anticipation of ever-increasing environmental standards, it will allow the city to stop dumping treated wastewater into the river.
Many cities do not have such an option, but by thinking outside of the box, Lebanon was able to do it, he said. The wastewater will be pumped under the river and allowed to soak through the wetlands, filtering out chlorine and temperature before the water enters the river.
“I’m the best fit for this district,” Thackaberry said. “I live in a house in the city of Lebanon.”
At the same time, he runs his parents’ farm, on which they raise livestock, grass seed and timber, and he said he understands agricultural and rural issues.
“I’m on the City Council,” he said. “I have an understanding of (city) issues, water rates, sewer rates, crime.”
He is balanced between rural and city issues, he said. “These are issues I understand.”
Thackaberry, who said he is generally conservative, identified three main issues for the state, tax fairness, education and healthcare.
Tax fairness
“Almost a billion dollars is not collected in the state of Oregon in income taxes because plenty of people are cheating,” Thackaberry said, basing his figures on an IRS report. “I think we should aggressively crack down on these cheats.
“We can help with education funding. We can help with healthcare funding if we cracked down on that.”
The state would need to hire a few more auditors and send a message, he said. “Everybody receives government services. Everybody should be paying.”
Education
“If we can begin to increase revenues this way, we should be able to fund education,” Thackaberry said. At least, it would be enough to make sure schools are funded the minimum 190 days per year.
It would provide enough money to reduce class sizes, he said. This state has large class sizes compared to others in the country.
“When we voted in Measure 5 (1990), we said we wanted the Legislature to take care of funding education,” he said. “We’re going to see to it they get adequate funding.”
He said he supported the way charter schools are run now, under the umbrella of school districts, which serve as a watchdog.
Thackaberry said he is concerned about how the state’s assessment testing system works.
“I don’t know it’s the place of the Legislature to tell teachers how to teach,” he said. The state needs guidelines about what to teach at each level in school, but “I don’t think the Legislature needs to climb inside every classroom and say we know best.”
Rather, “we’ll make sure you have the money,” he said of schools. “Can you give us results?
“There seems to be a lot of people upset with it (state testing).”
It may be the legislature’s doing, he said. It needs to be looked at and perhaps pulled or changed.
Healthcare
“We have 600,000 people in Oregon with no healthcare at all,” Thackaberry said. “I think we can do better if we can increase revenues by cracking down on tax cheats.”
The federal government has many 2-1 grant match programs, he said. “This state hasn’t even picked up the $1 to get the $2. I think that’s a mistake on the part of the state.”
The public already essentially pays for healthcare on the uninsured, he said. The uninsured often wait until a problem gets bad and then go to the emergency room. If they had gone to a doctor sooner, it would have cost less.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said. He wants to make sure people can go to the doctor not the emergency room.
“I don’t know if we can get 600,000 onto coverage, but we can get a lot of children onto coverage,” he said.
The state can also do a number of things to improve healthcare, he said. The state could join a pool for prescription drug services. It might expand the Oregon Health Plan.
“I know former Gov. John Kitzhaber is excited about trying to do something new, and I’m willing to listen to his ideas,” Thackaberry said.
Budgets and taxation
Money is short at the state, Thackaberry said. It’s missing $1 billion, and close to $2 billion over a biennium.
That’s a fair amount of money, he said, and it would help solve the state’s money problems.
He would like to see the state create a rainy day fund, he said. “Other states have it. It’s time we have that.”
He would not consider the individual kicker, but he would consider the state keeping the corporate kicker to help build a rainy day fund.
The kicker is money refunded to taxpayers when revenues exceed state projections by more than 2 percent.
“I’m not even sure I’d take the corporate kicker,” Thackaberry said, but creating a rainy day fund inside the budget could have its own complications. He would hate to set money aside “and leave a child bleeding in the street.”
Illegal immigration
At the state level, there’s not much that can be done, Thackaberry said. It’s a federal responsibility, and he doesn’t understand why the federal government has not dealt with it.
He thinks the federal government should develop a guest worker program, he said. Agriculture, where many of them work, is not glamorous; and it’s hard to find people to work in it.
He doesn’t know what the state can do about issuing licenses to illegal immigrants, he said. “If they have the right ID, the DMV has to give them a license. They’re showing some kind of ID, real or phony.”
That again is really a federal issue, he said, and “if you don’t give them a license, they’re still driving anyway.”
That’s a public safety issue, he said. “The feds have dropped the ball, and we’re the victims.”
Speed limits
Thackaberry opposes increasing speed limits, at least on Interstate 5 north of Albany.
The freeways are too congested for higher speeds, especially when other drivers do not pick up the speed and freeway speeds vary by as much 25 mph.
He said he might approve increases on stretches such as those between Bend and Burns.
Extension Service and biofuels
“This is mostly a rural district,” Thackaberry said. “Half the people live inside the city limits of Sweet Home, Lebanon, Stayton and Sublimity.”
Over the last 25 years, the Extension Service has been cut, he said, but the program is beneficial to rural communities. He wants to see the program restored to its historic levels.
“Also, I think biofuels are a great way for us to go,” he said. He currently runs a mixture of cooking oil and diesel in his farm equipment.
OSU is one of six research sites for biofuels, he said. “This district and this state should jump on the bandwagon.”
Field burning
Thackaberry thinks that burning grass fields is on the way out. He doesn’t use it for economic reasons, and he thinks the free market will eventually eliminate it.