Doug White

I was looking around this district, and I noticed that the problems that we face today were the same problems. My grandpa used to tell me about 50-60 years ago, that it’s water, it’s immigration, it’s infrastructure. And now it’s climate change. When I was growing up, you could raise a family on a single income and own a house. When did we trade that in for minimum wage jobs and crippling rent for the rest of your life? I’m not looking to the past through rose-colored glasses, because I’m a gay man, and I do know that my life is a whole lot better now than it was fifty years ago, but why did we have to leave the prosperity behind? I don’t think that was necessary at all.

2. What priorities would you focus on if elected?

I see several. One is drought resiliency and management of water. We have always faced the risk of drought. And that’s been unnecessary, at least unnecessarily unnecessary. In the last thirty years, we’ve had the capability and the technology in order to build the bigger reservoirs that would create that resiliency. We also need to address the draining of the Odessa aquifer, which is causing contaminated drinking water to a lot of the people, and we need to think about replenishing that. I think that our water is vital to this part of the world. It’s core to everything we do. We even have the funds in order to be able to do that. Many of the projects are even already on the books, we just haven’t moved forward. So those are things we need to do.

Immigration — we are a country of mostly immigrants, and it is who we are, and it is who we continue to be. It is not understandable to me why we treat immigration as somehow an attack on our country: It isn’t. It’s what we need to be able to continue to grow and thrive and become more diverse, which makes us stable and more resilient as a community. We need to rethink our immigration laws, we need to address amnesty, the H-2A visa process, and we need to have a serious approach to pathway to citizenship.

 I think the other thing that’s important is infrastructure. Going back, it’s been a half a century, seventy years since then there’s been any significant investments in our infrastructure.

3. A lack of affordable housing is a community concern throughout Klickitat County. What can Congress do to mitigate this issue and what solutions do you support?

All up and down the district, we’re facing both a shortage of housing and a high cost of housing. And the White Salmon districts, I thought it was quite smart of them to put a moratorium on flipping low-income housing, in exchange for high income housing. That’s not a solution. It’s definitely not a solution. But it’s what they did — they used the tools and the resources they had available to them to slow down this march of housing disappearing and low-cost housing disappearing until they could come up with a better solution. So I like to see people being creative.

I can be very supportive in my role as representative. Unfortunately, at the federal level, it’s difficult for me to intervene and a lot of the discussions that you’re having, because they are driven almost exclusively at the local or the state level. I understand that’s where a bit of the contention is right now, between local government and the state. And, sadly, this particular role has very little input into that. I think what we do at the federal level, though, is to create guidelines in which we can make sure that whatever is being implemented is safe, or at least the best that we can provide. As I’ve said, we’re smart enough, we have the technology enough, and we’re rich enough to make the right decisions. There’s no excuse to make for us to be making wrong decisions.

4. Klickitat County has seen its share of impacts from climate change, ranging from wildfires and heatwaves to hazardous air quality. What measures do you support to mitigate the effects of climate change?

We’re very fortunate in Central Washington to have been the leader in carbon-free energy production for a long time, and we are going to continue to be the leader in carbon free energy production for a long time to come. Between energy in the Northwest, our ability to scale up our wind and our solar, next generation nuclear, and our hydroelectric production, we have the opportunity to be able to attract a lot of industry here in ways that other parts of the world can’t, as other people are trying to transition off of their fossil fuels, and to be able to reduce their carbon footprint. We’ve already done that. And we’re already ahead of the game, being able to maintain that lead. This has got to be attractive to industry bringing better paying jobs, family wage jobs to the area without adding to our carbon output. Where I see the big problem is the fact that we also need to pay attention to things like our wildfire, we need to expand our attention on climate change from just what we do as people to our stewardship of the planet. Last year’s wildfires pumped somewhere around 9,000 times more carbon into the atmosphere, through the wildfires than what we contribute as people. So we need to take a larger responsibility for what’s going on if we’re going to be serious about tackling climate change.