House District 52 candidate Jeff Helfrich is hoping to bring balance and bipartisanship to the Oregon state legislature, where he hopes to address housing, inflation, education and other priorities.
Helfrich is running against Darcy Long, the Democrat, Independent and Working Families candidate for Oregon House District 52. The district was modified this year to include The Dalles west to the Sandy River and Mount Hood.
Helfrich spoke Wednesday, Oct. 26, during an interview at the Hood River office of the Columbia Gorge News.
Background
Currently living in Hood River, Helfrich was appointed and served as representative of House District 52 from 2017 to 2019. He was born and raised in Colorado, outside the city Denver, and also on a family farm and ranch in Nebraska.
He served four years in the U.S. Air Force as a law enforcement canine handler, serving overseas in Honduras and in the first Gulf War. He left the service and worked in law enforcement, serving 25 years with the Portland Police Bureau before retiring in 2017. He then worked for the Multnomah County Sheriffs Office.
Helfrich is married and has two children. While living in Cascade Locks, he served as a budget committee member for the City of Cascade Locks, then the planning commission and later the city council.
“It gives you a different perspective on what government is and how you serve your community,” he said. “I became very knowledgeable regarding land use issues and planning issues.”
Legislative service
Appointed to the house in 2017, Helfrich managed to have two bills passed.
“I sat in the minority, which is a tough position to be in. But I approached it as a police officer: When I showed up on people’s doorstep as a police officer, I wasn’t there as a Democrat, or a Republican. It was ‘there’s a problem, how do you solve it?’ That approach is what made me successful as a legislator in Salem,” Helfrich said.
“I have a very pragmatic approach. For me, it’s about sitting down to have a conversation and create good, positive change in our state. I have the ability to get other people on board with a bill or an idea that is important.”
“That really helped me push the bills that I got passed as a freshman, which was an Eagle Creek Fire recovery bill that was able to get funding to the Hood River and Multnomah County Sheriff’s Offices. And then a house bill, for a study to see which school districts are retaining their teachers, how and why they’re retaining them, and why are other school districts losing their teachers,” Helfrich said.
“The next move would have been taking that information and then applying that statewide. We want a quality education for our kids, not just my kids, for everybody’s kids.
“I see myself as fiscally conservative, someone that is willing to compromise on certain things. We have to work together. We have to have compromise and balance. We don’t need more taxes, people work hard for the money. We need to run government efficiently, so we’re not spending it wastefully,” he added
Priority
Education has long been a priority for Helfrich. “Local control is big, understanding what they need,” he said. But standards are also important, as well as finding successful methods and programs. “We have to come up with a standard that everybody can agree upon.
In addition, successful programs and ideas need to be shared. For example, David Douglas High School in Portland received awards because, although they had smaller budgets than similar schools they had better outcomes for their students. “But other districts never went to them and said, ‘How did you do it?’” The state can facilitate that, he said.
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Helfrich also believes inflation to be an issue the legislature can have an impact on, citing passage of House Bill 4002 in 2021, which requires some agricultural workers to be paid for overtime hours worked, as inflationary. “When you increase the pay for workers, when they can get overtime pay even when they’re just here for a short amount of time, costs go up and the workforce has shrunk. That’s a direct correlation to inflation,” he said.
The 2019 Corporate Activities Tax, passed in 2019, is another “inflationary trigger,” he said.
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Law enforcement is also an issue in the state, Helfrich said, noting that many officers simply don’t feel supported. “It’s a struggle, they go to work every day, doing their job for the right reasons, yet they get criticized for not answering the right call or saying something the right way, and get a complaint against them,” he explained. “That’s not being supportive. They want you to act like a robot, but not be paramilitary. The job is less and less appealing,” he said.
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Regarding lack of affordable housing, Helfrich said increasing density in urban areas was at times a good idea, although he suggested neighborhood character should be considered, but added more land needs to be made available in rural areas as well. “We have people that are generational farmers, that can’t add an additional house for the kids,” he said. “We need to be able to develop more (non urban) areas, instead of having people that buy a 10-acre lot, put one house on it and some fruit trees and call it a farm or an orchard.”
In summary, Helfrich said, “I’m gonna ask for people’s vote. I have a proven track record, and I want to get back to Salem and work for the people.”
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