Incumbent Willis, challenger Wigg contend for Marion County commissioner seat

Stepping out of retirement after decades of forestry and transportation work in Oregon, Mark Wigg wants to unseat Colm Willis as he seeks a second term as a Marion County commissioner.

They are vying for Position 1 on the Marion County Board of Commissioners in the Nov. 8 general election. Commissioners are at-large positions, meaning all voters in the county can vote in every race.

The position is a full-time job with a roughly $115,300 base salary.

Wigg, 70, believes his experience makes him a better fit to ensure county government is accountable and responsive to residents. He said the county should more proactively spend the money it has available on needs such as housing services and mental health treatment.

Willis, 36, was first elected in 2018 and said his first term on the board is ending in the middle of several projects he believes will be vital for the community. Those include the county’s ongoing effort to provide building and septic permits for hundreds of homes damaged by wildfire in 2020 and build a sewer system in Mill City and Gates. 

Willis was hired in 2008 to the U.S. Senate Joint Economic committee but left following the Great Recession. He said his concern that banks and corporations were receiving bailouts at the expense of citizens prompted his move back to Oregon. 

“I realized if I was going to keep doing this kind of work, I had to do it in a place where I really cared about just the basics of the people that I serve, and making sure that our communities are safe, and our roads are good, our garbage gets picked up on time, and that this continues to be a wonderful place to live,” he said.

Willis also works as a small business attorney in Stayton and was formerly the political director of Oregon Right to Life. 

Wigg worked on six national forests in fire crews and timber sale crews for the U.S. Forest Service, leaving in 1985 to work as a forestry consultant, map publisher and briefly a land use planner for the city of Salem.

He joined the Oregon Department of Transportation in 1996, where he spent ten years as an environmental manager for major projects, including widening Interstate 5 in Salem and the Salem River Crossing project. He also managed software projects for the state Department of Forestry, including replacing their accounting software.

Wigg has held leadership positions in local organizations including Salem Audubon Society, South Central Association of Neighbors, Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Council and Salem Chapter of the Society of American Foresters. In those roles, he pushed for the creation of several local trails, including the West Salem Audubon Preserve.

Wigg said he was enjoying retirement, but was struggling with the constant sight of people in pain in the streets. When he learned that Willis was running unopposed, he recalled thinking, “Guess I’m coming out of retirement.”

Wigg said three Republicans have been running Marion County since 1964. “They need another perspective,” he said.

Of Willis, he said, “I just don’t think he has the vision or experience for this job right now. I think I’m far better qualified for this job.”

Willis said his experience comes from leading the county through the 2020 wildfires, Covid and ice storms. 

“I think I did a pretty good job,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect, I don’t claim to be, but I’m proud of the work that I’ve done as a commissioner, I’m proud of my service to our community and I’m passionate about the people who live here and about this community that I love.”

Homelessness

Willis said county officials need to address a recent rise in unmanaged homeless camping, which he believes harms the community and the people living in the camps.

“This idea that it’s compassionate to allow people to live in these unregulated homeless camps is not true,” he said.

Both candidates said they support efforts by local service providers to set up supervised homeless camps, such as micro shelters.

“There’s a lot of creativity happening in that space. I think the government’s job is to create the rules of the road and set expectations, and then we also do provide a lot of mental and behavioral health care,” Willis said.

The county Board of Commissioners in August voted to buy a Salem property to move the county’s existing psychiatric crisis center to a larger location. Willis said the move will triple the capacity at the crisis center, a 24-7 facility on Salem Hospital’s grounds operated by the county’s Health and Human Services Department

He said the county recently hired additional staff for its Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program, which works with people who commit low-level crimes or have had previous encounters with police to refer them to social services they need, as well as its Mobile Crisis Response Team, which pairs police with mental health workers to respond to crisis calls.

Wigg said he believes the county needs to treat homelessness in the community as a health crisis.

Roughly 50 people who had been homeless in the Salem area died in the past two years, Jimmy Jones, executive director for the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency told Salem Reporter in May. 

“That’s more than all of our traffic deaths, all our murders, all of our fire deaths combined,” Wigg said.

Wigg said the county has been slow to distribute funding intended to help people who are homeless or mentally ill.

“The fact that the county has millions of dollars in money that they didn’t spend because they didn’t react fast, that is wrong,” he said. “A lot of it is just inaction.”

Wigg said the cheapest housing Marion County can provide is setting up campgrounds and trailer parks, which could be managed and sanitized, near industrial parks and away from residential areas.

In response to the local housing crisis, he said the county could also offer incentives for tenants, such as putting in new windows or better insulation, to hold rent rates for a certain number of years.

Wildfires

Since the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires in 2020, Willis said the county has rebuilt homes much faster than most wildfire-affected communities throughout the U.S..

He said that’s because the county has worked with those impacted to ensure they didn’t have permitting barriers that prevented them from rebuilding.

They hired additional permitting staff so people weren’t stuck waiting to rebuild, and worked with the state Legislature to reduce property taxes for a year for people whose homes were damaged, he said. Commissioners also hired city managers for Detroit, Mill City and Gates to help them apply for grants to rebuild their water systems. 

A Community Health Impact Assessment of the Santiam Canyon conducted by Oregon State University between July and November 2021 and released in February found just 53% of the 694 homes impacted by the wildfires had been issued septic permits by then.

Wigg said the county needs to speed up the permit process, which is slowing rebuilding.

“That’s the role of a leader, they hold staff accountable,” he said. “If (staff) say, ‘Well, I need more staff. I need more budget.’ Okay, you got it. Let’s get it done.”

Wigg said he opposed lowering building standards to make rebuilding cheaper. 

“We’ve got to build to be fire-safe,” he said.

Public safety

County officials next year will expand the often-full Marion County Jail to fit dozens more inmates and hire 15 more employees to run the facility. Both candidates said more beds were needed at the jail.

“But that isn’t going to solve the homeless crisis,” Wigg said.

Willis said the jail expansion is necessary because there are people still in the community who harm others and need to be incarcerated.

Willis expects that His Place, a county-run transitional living program that will provide childcare and addiction treatment for fathers with substance abuse disorders, will open later this fall. It’s intended to be an alternative to the current practice of placing children in foster care while their fathers receive treatment – and a near replica of Salem-based Her Place.

Before commissioners approved the purchase of a Woodburn building for His Place in March, Willis said he talked about the program with the chief financial officer of Portland-based insurance company PacificSource, which provided a $500,000 donation to cover most of the sale.

“That was an area where we asked some of the folks at (the county’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program) what they needed, what was a resource that was missing for them to help them be successful,” he said.

But Willis said Marion County and other communities are bearing the brunt of the Oregon State Hospital’s capacity issues.

When the state recently allocated $6.3 million for a residential treatment program in Marion County, commissioners on Sept. 21 postponed a vote to accept the state money. The facility would care for people found unable to aid and assist in their own defense due to a mental illness or disability, as a federal judge in late August set limits on how long such patients could be ordered to receive treatment at the Oregon State Hospital.

“You’re taking people who have a track record of harming others, who have a serious mental illness, who haven’t completed treatment, and they’re going to be released in our community with no resources. That’s a real serious problem for us,” Willis said.

Wigg opposed the board’s decision to postpone the vote, saying county officials should take what funding they can get to treat the patients who the hospital will release back into Marion County.

“(The state) should probably give more than $6 million, but to not accept it at all makes no sense,” he said. “People are still coming.”

Wigg said the county should work with the city of Salem to improve police agencies’ responses to people in crisis.

Despite widespread public support for a crisis response program separate from police, the city paused plans last year to start one through United Way of the Mid-Willamette Valley after learning the state money they hoped to use had to first go through the county. But county officials didn’t want to pursue a program that overlapped with crisis response services already in place.

Wigg said it is possible to expand crisis services through the Salem Police Department and Marion County Sheriff’s Office by adding a subset of unarmed peace officers that respond to some crisis calls.

CAMPAIGN MONEY: Here are totals for each campaign as reported by the state Elections Division as of Oct. 19. To look into individual donations and expenditures, start with this state website: Campaign finance.

WILLIS

Contributions: $95,562. Expenditures: $39,469. Cash balance: $134,744 (includes balance from prior campaigns)

Top five donors: Andrew Siegmund, $10,000; Aidan M Willis, $10,000; Emery & Sons Construction Group LLC, $10,000; Evergreen Biopower LLC, $10,000; Allied Rock, $7,500; Siegmund Excavator and Construction, $7,500 (tie)

WIGG

Contributions: $14,716. Expenditures: $11,906. Cash balance: $$2,857

Top five donors: Mark Wigg, $4,500 cash and in-kind; Chris Ching, $3,000 in-kind; Britta Franz, $1,000; Marion County Democratic Central Committee, $500 in-kind; Daniel Saucy, $300 

Correction: This story was updated to reflect that Willis was formerly political director of Oregon Right To Life, not the director. Salem Reporter regrets the error.

Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.

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