Democrat Jerry Allen runs for Oregon Senate District 2

Jerry Allen faces Republican candidate Art Robinson for the District 2 seat.

The district largely covers Josephine County and areas of Jackson County north and west of Medford.

And then you'll be able to hear mr. allen's full response.

Starting off, i asked mr allen what makes him the best candidate for the position.

Well, i've had a career before i retired as a hospital executive, a clinic founder and financial and pension elected trustee.

I now am running for the state senate because.

We're in a great crisis time and we need competent, truthful cooperative, uh, leaders in the legislature to bridge the partisan divide.

I have experienced bridging a partisan divide.

I did that when i was a pension trustee, i was a democrat.

I was elected and the republican members of that board eventually voted me as chairman of the investment committee and protect people from the pandemic while still working to rebuild the economy and while looking at the risks presented by ongoing wildfire risk.

Thank you.

It's a twin crisis.

First we have the covid-19 pandemic that is running through our country.

And then on top of that, is that the.

Messing up of all of the businesses and jobs causing people to be unemployed and lose their healthcare.

And small businesses are going bankrupt.

I've talked to a lot of small businesses who don't know if they can keep going on.

And so it's, it's a complex crisis.

And then we have the overlay of the fires here in the west, which have created a loss the state could finance the rebuilding process and economic expansion while not raising taxes.

Great.

Thank you.

I'm a big fan of infrastructure bonds.

They're called often green bonds.

Massachusetts is issuing them right now.

Basically use them to fund the kinds of things that we need, need to do to build oregon back better.

But it's sort of like when you buy a house, you don't pay for it all at once you get a 30 year mortgage, those bonds are like a 30 year bond.

So we can pay for it over time.

We don't have to break the budget in order to do it.

Cause we don't want to raise taxes on a common people here.

What we want to do is get the job done and we've got a lot of rebuilding to do, particularly here in rural southern oregon.

We need to cooperate together to get the money and the help down here so that people can be helped by that we can use infrastructure bonds to jumpstart affordable housing development.

Uh, solar and wind development, which is increasing here in oregon, uh, rapidly, but we need to go faster with that to address the climate issues.

We can do all of those things and help create thousands of living wage jobs here.

And that will help us because as you probably know, southern oregon has a, a job crisis.

We have unemployment, we have a lot of young people who have absolutely no way to.

To, uh, to be employed, we need to address that and we can do it if we do that kind of program.

And i've talked with folks in the, the infrastructure bonds.

My final question for mr. allen was what he sees as his major priorities for the district.

First we have to do affordable housing.

It's absolutely critical.

And we have to do job building programs, like more incentives to get solar and wind and all of the, uh, the new job areas going so that we can get people back to work.

We have to get people back