State House District 17 incumbent Sherrie Sprenger says she set out this term to hold the line on taxes and devote time to helping the timber industry that remains critical to many of the communities she represents.
“In February 2008, I said I would be accountable to folks to hold the line on taxes, and I would do my best to reduce spending,” Sprenger said. “I’ve also devoted time to helping the timber industry.”
She has represented her communities and continues to do so, she said.
“I’m one of 60 votes in the house and majority rules, so I didn’t always get my way,” Sprenger said. But she said she does get to stand up and tell other legislators exactly how the things they’re doing will affect the people of Scio, Sweet Home and other east Linn County communities.
Sprenger said she has lived in Oregon all her life, and she loves it.
“I work toward policy that allows my 13-year-old son to grow up in the same kind of Oregon I grew up in,” Sprenger said. “And I don’t like the direction the state is going.”
Sprenger, a Scio-Lacomb area Republican, faces challenger Richard Harisay, a Democrat from Sublimity, in the Nov. 2 general election for House District 17. Harisay has yet to accept an interview with The New Era.
Returning to the Legislature, she plans to continue in the same fashion, she said. “One thing I can always do in the legislature is I can talk about how decisions affect us at home.”
After the death of a Scio teen killed in a crash while driving a tractor, she championed legislation to redefine tractors, to include tractors with enclosed cabs in the laws protecting them on the roadways.
During the process, a representative from the Portland area asked what a “farm implement” was, Sprenger said. “There is an education process, and I actually brought a bunch of John Deere tractors (miniatures) into committee,” she said. She asked committee members to point out the tractors. All of them were “tractors,” but only one lacked an enclosed cab.
That’s common with farm equipment now, she said.
Several weeks ago, Sprenger hosted an educational meeting on using biomass as an energy source, she said. Nearly 20 legislators attended and heard from representative of Freres Lumber of Lyons, T2 of Sweet Home and the Oregon Department of Forestry.
There they learned about a bill Sprenger plans to reintroduce in 2011 to help make transportation of woody biomass, what she said is a fancy term for old-fashioned slash piles, feasible.
“It’s about a transportation tax credit for biomass,” she said. Right now, with increasing transportation fees and taxes, transporting the biomass is cost prohibitive.
A small tax credit will provide just enough of a boost to allow the industry to start transporting the material, Sprenger said. That would create jobs and provide a source of energy.
It didn’t pass last session, but she is hoping with education that it will next year.
Sprenger also plans to address a rising amount of cougar activity, sightings and attacks on livestock, next session, she said. She isn’t looking to overturn the ban on hunting with dogs, but she would like to pursue a regional approach, allowing counties the ability to deal with the issue in a way that works for them.
Right now it’s about livestock and family pets, she said. She’s sorry about those losses too.
“I’d rather be talking about those things than kids,” she said. “I don’t want to wait until we’re talking about them before we address it.”
She plans to continue her opposition to tax increases, she said. “You can’t tax your way out of a recession.”
The issue may be difficult, but the solution also is clear, she said. The state and federal government must get out of the way to allow the private sector to create jobs, increasing the number of taxpayers.
“People are wanting to be working,” she said. “They’re not wanting handouts.”
She recalled one legislator on the revenue committee saying, “The state has a budget problem. The state needs money.”
Rather, she said, “I would say, the state has a budget problem because people at home had it first.”
It may be global economic crisis, Sprenger said, and in Oregon, the state passed taxes on people who were struggling.
On the House floor Sprenger gave a “Main Street” speech on measures 66 and 67 at the beginning of the year. She described how they would impact a coffee house in Mill City, a seed store in Scio and many more businesses, the neighbors and employers who pay taxes, throughout her district.
The tax measures were an attempt to close a budget gap. Though passed, the state has since had to cut its budgets twice based on low revenue projections. Locally, including a federal stimulus package, School District 55 has had to cut $1.1 million from a May budget based on the state’s budget.