Two newcomers are in the race for Oregon’s House District 22 seat, so whoever is elected on Nov. 8 will bring change for the area.
House District 22 represents portions of northeast Salem up to Woodburn. The seat is currently held by Democrat Teresa Alonso Leon, who opted not to seek re-election and instead ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in U.S. Congressional District 6.
Republican Tracy Cramer, a property management business owner, is challenging Democrat Anthony Medina, a state worker and current Woodburn School Board director.
This district has historically leaned left with 53% of residents voting for Democratic candidates, compared to 41% voting Republican, according to an independent analysis from website Dave’s Redistricting.
Anthony Medina, Democrat
Medina, 31, has lived in District 22 most of his life. He was born and raised in Gervais, where he went to school and lived before going to Western Oregon University and Stanford. He moved to Washington D.C. after college to work in U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio’s office, before eventually moving back to Woodburn in 2015, where he currently lives with his wife and three children.
As the first person in his family to graduate from high school and college, Medina said education policy is an important issue to him. He’d also focus on providing affordable health care for all and pathways to jobs for low-income Oregonians.
“I’m passionate about this community,” he told Salem Reporter. “My family moved to Woodburn in the 1960s and worked in labor camps right outside of town as farmworkers. And so my roots, my passion for this district, really span decades and when I think about House District 22 whether it’s Woodburn, Gervais or northeast Salem, it’s a community that I am really passionate about.”
Medina has experience working at the state level. He has worked in Oregon’s Chief Financial Office and for the last five years has been a senior policy analyst for the state and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. He has also been on the Woodburn School Board since 2017.
Medina made headlines recently after suing a Woodburn massage parlor and reporting to police that he was groped while seeking a massage. Medina said he and the owner, Fuxiu Zhen, recently reached a settlement agreeing that Zhen cannot operate, own or work for, or with an unlicensed massage establishment in Oregon until 2032.
Education is a key reason Medina is seeking the seat, as he wants to keep investment in public schools a priority.
“Folks went through a lot during the pandemic, and how do we ensure that needs are being addressed and that we make investments where we need to in public education?” he said. He would look to keep class sizes low, provide mental health support in schools, and keep investing in career technical education.
The emphasis on postsecondary education, including trade schools, is important, he said, to ensure those who come from low-income households have more paths to jobs.
“Growing up, I was raised by my grandparents,” he said. “They moved to Oregon in the 1960s as farmworkers and so my grandpa would always tell me, ‘Mijo just get a job inside with air conditioning.’” Medina’s opportunity to go to college allowed him the chance to “meet the journey of those words” and seek out a new career path.
He also said he wants to make sure all Oregonians have access to “quality and affordable health care.”
This relates to where Medina sees solutions for the growing homeless population in Oregon, and prioritizing investments in mental and behavioral health and addiction counseling, as well as transitional housing.
“We can support our unhoused neighbors in our community to transition them to safe and stable housing,” he said. “We also need to keep people in their homes so that means addressing our housing supply and affordability, and protecting renters. When it comes to our house, folks here in the district, we need to ensure that they have safe and sanitary conditions as well. We need to get our streets and our parks to be clean and safe for everyone to do that in a humane and compassionate way.”
Medina said he also would work to create more local and state collaboration around affordable housing and homelessness, since many people are working in “silos” around the issue.
On the issue of abortion rights in Oregon, Medina said he would protect laws currently in place, which have virtually no restrictions on abortion.
“It’s scary to see that decades of precedent around reproductive rights have been stripped away at the federal level,” he said. “I think Oregon could certainly serve as a beacon for the country to show that here in Oregon we protect reproductive rights and autonomy. This just makes the state election that much more important to ensure that we elect leaders who are going to lead with reproductive rights, and ensuring folks have autonomy over their bodies.”
Tracy Cramer, Republican
Cramer, 33, has also lived in the district for nearly her whole life. She was born and raised in Gervais, where she graduated from high school before moving to the Albany and Corvallis area for dental assisting school. She moved back to Gervais after her father passed away in 2017.
Cramer and her husband, Jake, have three children and own three businesses in property management in Gervais and working with collegiate housing organizations at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University.
She is running on a platform of reducing crime in the district, promoting school vouchers and increased educational standards, and more resources for law enforcement.
“I never thought I’d get into politics but then I kept seeing things in my community failing and politicians failing the community, and it got me riled up,” she told Salem Reporter. “I simply am a concerned mom and citizen and business owner and I’m pretty frustrated with how things are currently being run.”
One key issue for her is crime. Cramer said she had a personal experience of someone who she believed was homeless trying to break into her home, and it took police a few hours to respond. For this reason she sees the need for more resources for law enforcement.
“The crime rate has just continued to go up, and there’s a lot of things I think that tie into it, you can’t really pinpoint one specific thing … but it is very concerning,” she said. “As I go up and talk to law enforcement they’re all saying the same thing: they can’t do anything. Their hands are tired, they can show up and maybe escort that individual off the property but there’s not a lot of other things they can do and no one is being held accountable.”
Cramer had the same response to solutions for addressing the growing homeless population in Oregon, stating that the increased rate of homelessness is contributing to crime and that she would like to see less “red tape” for law enforcement response, allowing them to arrest or cite them. She also would push for more resources for mental health and rehabilitation.
“If we’re not putting the resources in place for people that do have mental health issues or drug rehab establishments, … where do we expect these individuals to go?” she said. “So we do need to come at it with some resources and some things clearly need to be established… where these individuals are getting the help that they need, and the rehab that they need and working back into society.”
Another major issue for Cramer is related to schools. She would like to raise standards and graduation requirements for schools, legislators in 2021 voted to suspend a standardized testing requirement to earn a diploma.
“Our standards have been lowered,” she said. “The public schools are not living up to the standards that they need to be living up to.”
Because of this, Cramer supports school vouchers, which would give education dollars directly to parents to spend at a public or private school of their choice.
“I think the parents need to be able to make that choice, and a lot of parents, I know their hands feel like they’re tied because maybe they financially can’t afford to send their children to the school of their choice, and so they’re left with one option,” she said. “And I don’t think that’s very fair. I don’t think that’s right. It’s their money being put into a system and then they don’t get to make the decision that they want to make.”
When it comes to Oregon’s abortion laws, Cramer said she would push to reduce the number of weeks allowed for an abortion.
“I do really believe that life is to be cherished. I think it’s important,” she said. “I have friends that I hold very dear to my heart that have had abortions themselves. And I think that a lot of times the conversation isn’t around what happens to those women after an abortion does take place and the truth is, is that most of the time those individuals – they go through a lot.”
She said the lack of limitations on how late people can have abortions in Oregon with public funds “needs to be corrected.”
“I think that we need to have some some common sense when it comes to abortion,” she said.
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.
MEDINA
Contributions: $286,338 Expenditures: $244,027 Cash balance: $44,059
Top five donors: Future PAC House Builders (campaign arm of House Democrats), $86,114 in-kind; Democratic Party of Oregon, $64,305 in-kind; Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, $25,000; Citizen Action for Political Education (political committee of the Service Employee International Union Local 503, which represents state and local government workers), $23,300 in-kind; Oregon Education Association PAC, $20,800 in-kind
CRAMER
Contributions: $505,894. Expenditures: $378,806. Cash balance: $134,665
Top five donors: Evergreen Oregon PAC (campaign arm of House Republicans), $178,125 cash and in-kind; Bring Balance to Salem PAC (largely funded by Nike founder Phil Knight), $160,000; Friends of Vikki (campaign committee for House Minority Leader Vikki Breese-Iverson of Prineville), $17,500; Jobs Political Action Committee, $15,000; Oregon Republican Party, $12,866 in-kind
Contact reporter Jordyn Brown at [email protected].
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Jordyn Brown is an Oregon journalist who formerly worked for the Eugene Register-Guard.
