A longtime state legislator is up against a south Salem businessman in the race for House District 20.
The district represents voters in south Salem west of Southeast Commercial Street, west Salem, Independence and Monmouth.
It leans Democratic, according to an analysis from the independent website Dave’s Redistricting, with 54% of district voters selecting Democratic candidates in elections between 2016 and 2020, versus 41% selecting Republicans.
Interested voters can watch the candidates debate Friday, Oct. 21 from 12 to 1:30 p.m. at Salem City Club’s meeting at the Willamette Heritage Center. More information and registration is available on the city club website.
Dan Farrington, Republican
Farrington, 62, owns Sunrise Medical Consultants in Salem and lives in south Salem.
He ran in 2012 to represent House District 21, losing to incumbent Brian Clem. With his home now in the redrawn boundaries for District 20, Farrington said the time seemed right to give politics another shot.
“I’ve owned my own business for 20 years, and I’m really tired of the tax structures and the rules and regulations that kind of control what we do for a living and how to make money and so I decided, why not? If you’re going to complain, you might as well run for office, see if you can make a difference,” he said.
Oregon’s business climate, education and public safety are top issues for his campaign.
Farrington opposes Oregon’s corporate activity tax, which legislators passed in 2019 to fund a $1 billion annual increase in K-12 and early childhood education. The tax is instituted on larger businesses’ “commercial activity,” like sales and receipts, rather than profits, which Farrington said doesn’t make sense.
“They’re getting taxed before they pay any of their bills,” Farrington said. He said that tax causes businesses to move out of state, and that “there’s other ways to fund” the education programs the tax supports.
He said the state’s new paid family leave program, which taxes Oregon workers and employers with more than 25 employees starting in January, is another example of an unfair tax on business that makes it harder to operate in the state. Providing employees paid leave should be up to private businesses, he said.
On public safety, Farrington said he opposes voter-approved Measure 110 which decriminalized possession of user quantities of street drugs in 2020.
“There needs to be accountability and there needs to be consequences for people carrying drugs,” he said.
He’s worked as a mentor for Salem’s Union Gospel Mission fellowship program for the past five years and said too many recovery programs for drug and alcohol abuse don’t focus on what happens after people get clean and sober. He’d like to see money go toward programs like theirs that have accountability, he said.
“We have to work on finding ways to change those personalities and those types of things,” he said.
He’d like to see more funding for police coming out of what Oregon currently spends on recovery programs. Farrington said officer pay should be higher and Oregon needs a fund to recruit more law enforcement officers to fill vacancies.
On education, Farrington said he’d urge the governor to throw out Oregon’s current curriculum for K-12 schools and focus on returning to basic skills like reading and math.
“Quit teaching the social issues, especially the pronouns and if you’re a boy or girl or whatever you are. We need to throw that out the window. There’s a time and place to teach that at a higher level. For our youth, we need to make sure that they have a good foundation when they go into high school,” he said.
Farrington said his experience as a coach would help him as a legislator because he has practice explaining a vision and uniting a team behind it.
“We have to look long term for Oregon. Right now we’re failing,” he said. “The only way you’re going to change that is to truly evaluate the direction we’re going.”
Paul Evans, Democrat
Evans, 52, has represented District 20 since 2015. He’s an Air Force veteran and instructor at Chemeketa Community College, and resides in Monmouth, where he formerly served as mayor.
Evans said navigating economic challenges is among top issues for most voters. He said he’ll continue his focus on creating an economy in Oregon that helps middle class families and businesses. He also wants to continue work on emergency preparedness and revamping the state’s education system with more focus on technical careers and apprenticeships.
“People are recognizing that we have to figure out a way to be more competitive in the 21st century workforce,” he said.
Evans said one of his major accomplishments in the Legislature was working to reform the state’s emergency management system, making emergency management a stand-alone agency and investing more in fire monitoring and prevention.
“The fires that we had this year are proof those investments made a difference,” he said. “We were able to attack them sooner. We had folks that were able to mitigate stuff where we knew there might be fires.”
Evans said he has a strong focus on constituent services as a legislator and works to help businesses navigate red tape.
“We’ve done our best to try to take individual problems and help small businesses navigate the bureaucracy. Agencies are the result of good ideas put into legislation, but they often do big things and sometimes aren’t so great on the details,” he said.
He said he considers the impact of policies on small businesses and said it’s common for legislators to exempt them from new regulatory requirements or taxes – like the state’s new paid family leave program.
“I believe we’ve actually done pretty well. The economy is actually relatively strong compared to other states,” he said.
Evans said Oregon ranks comparatively well in its tax policy, pointing to a 2021 analysis from the nonprofit Tax Foundation, which listed the state 15th overall in tax burden, though 49th in corporate taxes.
Evans said homelessness in Oregon is a symptom of larger problems including decades of neglecting mental health care, and economic conditions that make affording housing a burden for middle class families.
On education, Evans said he supports fully funding Oregon’s quality education model, which would better equip students to graduate with the skills they need to get a good job.
He voted for suspending a state diploma requirement that students demonstrate proficiency on standardized tests to graduate high school. Evans said the suspension will give state agencies time to look deeper at Oregon’s graduation requirements, since the previous system wasn’t working well. He said it’s not an effort to lower standards, and his interest is in developing a system that produces graduates ready for the workforce.
“When you’re in a ditch you stop digging,” he said. “It was a temporary pause for the experts to get their legs underneath them and to actually have a plan.”
Evans said his record as a committee chair shows he can work with Republicans, and said many major issues facing the state, like emergency preparedness, aren’t partisan.
“You can still do big things, important things without making it partisan,” he said.
CAMPAIGN MONEY: Here are totals for each campaign as reported by the state Elections Division as of Oct. 18. To look into individual donations and expenditures, start with this state website: Campaign finance.
FARRINGTON
Contributions: $143,187. Expenditures: $136,405. Cash balance: $6,783
Top five donors: Evergreen Oregon PAC (campaign arm of the House Republicans), $66,594 cash and in-kind; Oregon Republican Party, $17,018 in-kind; Friends of Vikki (campaign committee for House Minority Leader Vikki Breese-Iverson of Prineville), $12,500; Bring Balance to Salem PAC (largely funded by Nike founder Phil Knight), $5,000; Oregon Right to Life PAC, $2,500
EVANS
Contributions: $414,850. Expenditures: $360,037. Cash balance: $$71,609.
Top five donors: Democratic Party of Oregon, $85,743 in-kind; Future PAC, House Builders (campaign arm of the House Democrats), $46,486 in-kind; Citizen Action for Political Education (political committee of the Service Employee International Union Local 503, which represents state and local government workers), $28,100 in-kind; Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, $25,000; Oregon Health Care Association PAC, $20,000
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
