Oregon governor Kate Brown met her Republican challenger Dr. Bud Pierce on Saturday evening in Bend for the first debate of this gubernatorial campaign. They sparred on a variety of issues, from taxes to land use to the state budget.
Brown and Pierce faced off at the Riverhouse on the Deschutes in Bend. The candidates fielded questions from a panel of journalists, including JPR’s Emily Cureton. After introducing himself as a janitor’s kid who worked as a bag boy growing up in a farming town, Pierce came out swinging.
“On my right is Governor Kate Brown," he said, "a 25 year career politician who has grown distant from the people and rarely visits the rural area."
Pierce repeated the “25-year career politician” line several times throughout the evening. Pierce is a physician who’s never held elected public office.
Kate Brown, a former family law attorney, served in the Oregon legislature and as Secretary of State. She assumed office as governor following the resignation of Governor John Kitzhaber early last year.
In response to a question from the panel, Brown restated her support for Measure 97, which – if approved by voters this fall -- would levy a two-and-a-half percent tax on corporate gross sales over $25 million. She said urgent public needs were going unmet, at least in part, because corporations in Oregon don’t pay their fair share to support state services.
“So I would ask Oregonians all across the state: Do you think our school year is long enough? Do you think our classroom sizes are small enough? Do you think it’s OK to kick 400,000 Oregonians off the Oregon Health Plan?”
Pierce vigorously disagreed.
“Measure 97 will cost the Oregon private economy 38 to 40,000 jobs, increase the cost of living for every Oregon family by $600,” he said. “I can’t accept it on increasing the cost of living and losing private sector jobs.”
Asked about the role of federal lands, Pierce said he supports gradually returning most federal lands in the West to local control for economic development.
“I could imagine that you carve out land that’s necessary for national parks, national defense, and maybe move toward a transfer of five percent a year of federal lands to the states, probably to the counties over a 20-year period of time, so that we can get some value out of them,” he said.
Brown called that idea unrealistic. Instead, she touted a recent agreement she’d signed with the US Forest Service to collaborate on thinning and fire prevention projects.
“It’s a win because it puts Oregonians back to work in our woods and it also creates healthy forests,” she said. “This is the kind of work that we can do. There is a third way and we need to work together to make it happen.”
Brown also pointed to agreements reached to avoid an endangered species listing for the Greater Sage Grouse as an example of successful collaboration between the federal government and local ranchers. Asked her stance on the possibility of the Obama Administration declaring a national monument in eastern Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands, Brown said she’d spoken with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.
“She’s informed me that they’re unlikely to move forward on a monument designation unless there’s been a collaborative process where local voices have had the opportunity to be heard, and I think that’s the right approach,” Brown said.
Pierce noted that voters in Malheur County had voted overwhelmingly to oppose such federal protections for the Owyhee. He said the locals should have the final say.
“Do you trust the people who live on the lands and who’ve managed the lands for many years?” he said. “Or, again, do you trust people from the outside or people that have a political agenda?”
Throughout the debate, Pierce portrayed Brown as a tax-and-spend liberal, at one point saying she’s “wholly owned by the public employee unions.” But Brown pushed back on her challengers’ calls for reducing the budget.
“We cannot cut our way to a better Oregon,” she said. “And my opponent is calling for an all-cuts budget. And if you look at public safety, that is not tolerable, particularly for our rural communities.”
Brown and Pierce have agreed to four more debates before the election. Whoever wins in November will serve out the rest of former governor Kitzhaber’s term, and will have to run again in 2018 for a full four-year term.
