Among the U.S. Congressional races that are being closely watched in this year’s general election is Oregon’s 6th Congressional District. It stretches from the suburbs southwest of Portland down into Salem, and includes all of Yamhill and Polk counties, along with portions of Marion, Washington and Clackamas counties.
Voters cast their ballots for the first time in this district in 2022 when they narrowly elected Democratic state Representative Andrea Salinas over her GOP challenger, Mike Erickson. He is the founder and CEO of AFMS, a supply chain and logistics consulting firm based in Tigard.
They are once again facing off to represent Oregon CD6 voters on Capitol Hill. Incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas and Republican candidate Mike Erickson join us for a debate on key issues and to outline their legislative priorities for the seat.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with a debate for Oregon’s 6th Congressional District. It stretches from the suburbs of Southwest Portland down into Salem, and includes all of Yamhill and Polk counties, along with portions of other counties. Voters cast their ballots in this district for the first time in 2022 when they narrowly elected three-term Democratic State Representative Andrea Salinas over her GOP challenger, Mike Erickson. He is the founder and CEO of a supply chain and logistics consulting firm based in Tigard. This year is a rematch and both candidates join me now. Welcome back to both of you to Think Out Loud.
Andrea Salinas: Thank you. Great to be here.
Mike Erickson: Thank you.
Miller: We did a virtual coin flip right before the show … and Andrea Salinas, you won it, so you’ll get a chance to answer this question first. You’ve both talked about inflation and lowering prices, everyday prices for Americans, as among your top priorities. Andrea Salinas, first – how do you propose to address that as a member of Congress?
Salinas: Thanks, Dave. I think a lot of your listeners know, but it’s worth repeating – I’m the proud daughter of a Mexican immigrant who grew up in a really hard working, union family. And I know that change is possible, but we have to work for it. I know because it’s happened for me and my family. My parents always taught me the value of hard work. If we worked hard, we could do anything. So I worked long hours at several different jobs to pay my way through college. And I was proud to be the first person in my family to graduate from a four-year university. But today, too many people are not feeling like their hard work is paying off. Working more than one job often isn’t enough, and families are having a hard time making ends meet – gas, groceries, housing and health care are crippling family budgets.
So I am running to make sure we bring down the cost of living and make life better for working people. We need to make sure that we are attracting additional investment from housing and home builders. We’re about 140,000 units short here in Oregon. We need to tackle the fentanyl issue and the addiction crisis, and make sure that gas prices are going down. We have bills in Congress that I’ve signed on to, that would protect our petroleum reserve from being sold to China. I’ve secured over $315 million in federal grant funding for critical programs and initiatives, as well as $14 million in direct funding that will actually help unlock some additional investments in housing, because they will improve water and sewer systems all across the district.
I’m excited for the work that I’ve been doing. I’ve been fighting and delivering for this community, over the past two years as a member of Congress, before that, as you mentioned, as a State Legislator. And I will continue to do that work to make Oregon a better place for everyone and to make sure everyone can get ahead.
Miller: Mike Erickson, how do you propose to change the prices that people are paying for goods and services as a member of Congress?
Erickson: Well, bringing some business perspective to Congress is badly needed. We have too many incompetent career politicians who’ve never stepped in the real world of running a business and paying for health care and seeing what’s going on in a business perspective, and finding business solutions. I think Congress needs more business people back there that can run a business, stay within a budget.
One of the things I’d like to do, first of all, is look at what are the real drivers of inflation? And what can I do? One of them is getting the price of diesel down to a price that it used to be, four or five years ago. Back to that $2, $3 range, versus the $4 to $7 range depending on the state and where you live. But right now, everything delivered to a store is delivered by truck, whether they go from the farmers or from a manufacturing plant, or from wherever they be going to, to the warehouse, then off to the store. Everything you see at Fred Meyer or Safeway is delivered by truck, and the biggest driver of the supply chain is the price of diesel. Literally, the cost is double what it used to be. And those costs are being passed on to consumers every day. So that’s a big part of what you’re seeing with inflation. What I would do is get our country back to be energy independent. There’s so much going on with fracking and other things that could help drive down the price of diesel. Diesel is the most expensive fuel source out there, even way higher than unleaded, as you probably know if you go to a gas station. But that’s the biggest cost driver.
I think I can work hard to get that price dropped down, but also work hard as a member of Congress to go through and push our Federal Reserve, and put as much pressure as I possibly can to get interest rates lower. The home builders that are out there building homes are not doing what they were doing five, six years ago, because interest rates are much higher. Construction loans are so much higher. So a lot of people put a lot of projects on hold. They wait until interest rates get lower before they start building apartments. They’re doing some of those projects that have been started a few years ago. I mean, as you probably know, it takes almost a year, year-and-a-half to get through the permitting process by the counties and the cities. Then they finally get it done and they’re seeing interest rates as high as they are. So, a lot of projects have been put on hold. We need to do everything we can to get those projects back on track. And it really comes down to the interest rate environment that’s going on. That’s one thing I want to do to help drive …
Miller: Andrea Salinas, the Federal Reserve … first of all, they have lowered interest rates recently, but the Fed doesn’t work for Congress, doesn’t necessarily respond to the President. What leverage do you think you would have in terms of interest rates?
Salinas: That’s right, Dave …
Erickson: Is this back to me?
Miller: No, I want to give Andrea Salinas a chance, and then I’m gonna go back to you.
Salinas: That’s right. Yeah, I think most folks know that the Federal Reserve is an independent body and really should not be influenced by politics. There are several pieces that Congress does have control over, though. Food and groceries, for instance. We need to get a strong bipartisan farm bill passed that will stabilize our food supply chain and bring down the cost of groceries. That means improving automation and mechanization on farms, so farmers don’t have to depend on unreliable labor sources. It also means helping our farmers recover from disasters like devastating wildfires. So, I actually got a piece of the farm bill, a provision included, that will look at making sure that our smaller and specialty crops have some kind of safety net, with some kind of crop insurance.
I’ve supported research and development to increase plant resilience, to help our growers become less reliant on Russian fertilizer markets, which we know right now are really expensive. These fertilizer costs are continuing to increase the cost of our groceries. We also know that utility costs are really high, and that folks are having a hard time making sure that they can turn on the heater or turn on the AC. My Democratic colleagues and I are pushing for the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act, which is a comprehensive plan, so going back to permitting, to cut some red tape and make it easier to build energy and infrastructure and improve energy supply chains to bring down the cost of energy. This …
Miller: Mike Erickson, I do want to go back to you though. On this question of lowering interest rates, what leverage are you saying you would have?
Erickson: I think you absolutely need to use your … as a member of Congress, put pressure on the Federal Reserve, write letters to the members, or just let your voice be heard. I think more people … they are independent, we all agree on that, but they can listen to members of Congress, or the President and other people. We need to put as much pressure as possible to keep interest rates back to where they were. I think they should have changed interest rates about a year ago. I mean, there’s so many problems with our contrary economy, even a year ago, I think it made some wrong decisions back there. I’ll be a real vocal opponent when I see something wrong. Like I think what the Federal Reserve has been doing, it should have been done a year ago ...
Miller: Let’s turn now … Mike Erickson, I’m going to stick with you, but turn to trade. Donald Trump has said he wants to enact 60% tariffs on goods from China and 10% to 20% tariffs on other goods made abroad. As somebody whose business is all about the global supply chain, what do you think of that proposal?
Erickson: I think tariffs are needed in certain places. I don’t think you put them on everywhere, because it becomes a back and forth: what we do to them, they do to us. And that raises prices for everybody. So right now, we just need to have a well thought out plan. Why are you putting certain things … maybe it’s on importing of cars, when we’re trying to keep our auto industry at full speed here. Other things, they can do it cheaper and other things where it’s maybe a little disadvantage in what they’re doing.
I think they all have to be looked at individually. I don’t necessarily agree with Trump on all his economic policies. A lot of them have worked out and been pretty good. So I have to look at them all individually.
Miller: The Constitution says it’s up to Congress to regulate commerce with foreign nations, but Congress has ceded a lot of that power to the Executive Branch over the last few decades. Would you vote, Mike Erickson, to take back some of that control, to give it back to Congress, as a way to prevent those tariffs from being enacted?
Erickson: Absolutely. I think that collectively, we’re probably a lot better off looking at this as a whole, with a lot of different voices from the whole country, than just one person making an arbitrary decision. I’d absolutely like to see that happen.
Miller: Andrea Salinas, what about you? Would you vote to give Congress more control once again, in terms of trade?
Salinas: Simple answer is yes, I do think that Congress has not only the ability, but the responsibility to look at our workforce, what our workforce demands are, whether jobs are being sent overseas and whether we can repatriate them back here in the United States … like we’ve been trying to do with the CHIPS and Science Act to bring semiconductor manufacturing back here to the U.S. I’ve been a big proponent of that as a member of the Science Space and Technology Committee.
But absolutely, we need to look at tariffs, and I think the Congress needs to be part of that conversation. We know that companies like Intel and Columbia, while they’re headquartered here and they have corporate entities here, they manufacture overseas. So when those goods and products come back, and you’re trying to get your kid a pair of tennis shoes for back-to-school shopping, or some outdoor athletic gear from Colombia, we know that families are being hit hard with those increased prices and we’re seeing that with these additional tariffs. So this absolutely has to be a conversation that the Ways and Means Committee of Congress and the Senate Finance Committee – Senator Wyden heads that up over on the Senate side – we need to be part of that conversation.
Miller: Andrea Salinas, sticking with you now, what would you support in terms of changes to federal immigration policy?
Salinas: Thank you for that question.There have been a number of different bills and proposals that I have been signing on to. I’m actually a member of the Democrats for Border Security caucus, and we’ve been having some robust conversations around this. There are certainly … I went down to the border last May, to El Paso, and I actually talked with our Customs and Border officials, as well as some of the surrounding communities in El Paso. And what we are seeing is, it’s not sustainable. Our Customs folks are being overrun and too many people are coming across the border. It’s not orderly and the communities cannot support this.
So we definitely need some additional resources. This is what Customs and Border Patrol told me directly. We need additional resources in terms of person power, and also in terms of technology, to be able to detect some of the illicit drugs that are coming across as well as some of the folks that are being illegally brought across. So definitely we need resources.
But we also need to make sure, at the same time, that people who have been working here [for] 10, 20, 30, 40 years, that they have a lawful pathway – either to work, or for permanent residency, or for citizenship. We know that so many of our workers here in Oregon and across the United States contribute, just like my family did. They pay taxes, and they contribute to this great society and the cultures and fabric of our communities. We need to give them some confidence that they have a future as well.
I think we can do both. I think we can support the workers that we have here with some sort of pathway to either, like I said, lawful work or permanent residency. But we also need to make sure that we aren’t letting people who are criminals across the border, and we need to make sure that we are keeping our border strong.
Miller: Mike Erickson, earlier this year, a bipartisan group of senators released an immigration bill. Republican Senator James Lankford described it this way – he said the bill provides funding to build the wall, increase technology at the border, and add more detention beds, more agents and more deportation flights. He also said it “ends the abuse of parole on our southwest border that has waved in over a million people and dramatically changes our ambiguous asylum laws by conducting fast screenings at a higher standard of evidence, limited appeals and fast deportation.” But Republicans turned against the bill after Donald Trump said he did not like it. Would you have supported it?
Erickson: From what you just described to me, probably yes. And here’s why – but there’s other reasons why a lot of people said no – there was other things tied to that bill. It wasn’t a stand-alone bill, and there was other things with Ukraine funding and other stuff that was tied to it. So it wasn’t just a stand-alone bill. If it was, I would definitely go for it.
But back to the earlier question, I want to finish one thing on my economic side of it. I really think the biggest driver for me, come and turn this country around, with the economics. And we got to get our national debt under control. I’m a fiscal conservative. I’m a business guy who runs a business within a budget. We just can’t have runaway national debt with our inflation. It’s a big part of it … we got what, $33 trillion debt. We’re paying more in interest payments than we are for the military to fund the entire military. We’ve got to solve that problem, and that’s the one big driver of inflation.
But back to the other question that we’re handed down about immigration. I think the biggest thing we need to do is really rework the guest worker visa program, the F-1 program. People are trying to come here and say they’re victims of political persecution, to come here under asylum, and they don’t even question it. They just get an automatic free pass in this country. They get a free bus ride to whatever city they want to go to, they get hotel rooms paid for by the government, meal visa cards. That’s just wrong. It’s coming right from taxpayer dollars, and there’s so many people on the streets and in this community that are starving and hurting that they should be being taken care of. Not people that just come here illegally.
And I want to change the guest worker visa program so that it’s easier and cheaper than paying $510 or maybe up to $1,000. It could take three months to a year to even get a guest worker visa permit. We need to really focus on solving the problem. The root of the problem is they’re coming in here under an asylum, which is not really why they’re here. They’re here for economic reasons, to get a job for a better way of life. And so they’re going to do that, do it the right way, where you’re paying taxes, you’re coming here legally, not illegally and you do all the background checks previously. So you’re not coming here, like criminals and from other countries … that’s gonna change. And that’s the first thing I want to do is, we’ll do real immigration reform as a member of Congress.
Miller: Andrea Salinas, back to you. What lessons have you taken away from Oregon’s experience with Measure 110, which, as I think everybody knows, decriminalized the possession of hard drugs before a public backlash led lawmakers to reverse course. What lessons have you taken from this entire episode?
Salinas: Yes, thanks, Dave. I just completed a “Life after Measure 110″ listening tour. I chatted with local officials, county commissioners, sheriffs, DA’s in the district, in all five counties. And the purpose of this tour was really to gather some perspective from people who are dealing with this on the ground. My biggest takeaway is, that although the state has reversed their position on Measure 110, and they are recriminalized fentanyl and other substances, we still don’t have a lot of the infrastructure. In fact, we just had a really great conversation … it was too bad my opponent didn’t attend the Yamhill County NAMI event, where we talked about mental health, addiction and recovery, as well as Measure 110, for over two hours. So we need support.
We need to make sure that we have peer support navigators. Our criminal justice system has asked for this. We need to make sure we have peer support specialists who can meet people where they are in their addiction recovery. We also need facilities. We know that we don’t have enough secure residential treatment facilities when people are seeking treatment. We also know that we don’t have transitional housing.
So there are a lot of pieces to this that we need to invest in. And right now, we are not seeing this. You know, this sudden explosive nature of this crisis has really put a huge burden on behavioral health providers. And we were already stretched thin before this crisis happened. We’re even stretched thinner now. So it’s why I have essentially addressed this problem head on, with a bill to increase providers, especially in the mental health, behavioral health and addiction field, with some scholarship programs. I reached across the aisle, and Congressman Mark Molinaro from New York has agreed to help me out on this bill.
I’ve also voted for bipartisan legislation like the HALT, the fentanyl act that will increase criminal penalties for fentanyl and help save lives. But again, the legislature similarly did this earlier this year. So …
Miller: Mike Erickson, I want to give you a chance to respond to this same question. What lessons have you taken away from Oregon’s experience with Measure 110? And how would you apply those as a member of Congress?
Erickson: Well, it was a state measure here that … by the way, what Salinas is doing now, what she said to a “Life After Measure 110″ tour, it would have been better for her to come out and not vote for it, and support Measure 110. She’s on the Measure 110 website right now, or as a State Representative, to go back and look at the whole history, and she’s one of the main supporters – Andrea Salinas, State Representative, Lake Oswego, supporter of Measure 110. She told Channel 2 TV that she didn’t, but she lied on TV. And you can pull up the records and go look at it. She was a strong supporter, one of the main supporters on the Measure 110 website. It’s out there right now, you can’t deny that.
So if she wanted to really solve the problem, which has been a big part of us with homelessness in the city and the state here … people are coming here, drug dealers are coming here, they view us as a free-for-all, any kind of drug was legal. That was just a wrong vote and a wrong decision. Having a dad as a police officer, watching one of the biggest problems in the city – the drug dealing, the drugs, and they drive so many people on the streets because they spend all their money on drugs or break into cars to feed their drug habits.
I mean, if Andrea Salinas had not voted for Measure 110, or came out and put her name on the Measure 110 website saying that she supports legalizing all hard drugs in Oregon, that’s the root of the problem. Instead of trying to solve the problem, now, we should have prevented that from day one. And if you’re a State Representative and you’re telling other people in the state that you support legalizing all drugs in Oregon, that is just wrong.
Miller: But here we are, now. What I’m wondering is what you would do, how you would approach drug addiction or fentanyl, as a member of Congress?
Erickson: What we need to do … the mental health crisis, the drug crisis, we need to do everything we can to support funding from the state or federal level, to give these people the treatment they need and to get them off the street and get back to being a productive life. So those are the things I want to do, is add as much resources from the federal government as allowed, to help our state deal with this crisis.
Miller: Mike Erickson, sticking with you, Oregon saw record acreage of wildfires this year. The Southeast is still reeling from one hurricane, another one is barreling towards Florida’s Gulf Coast right now. What congressional action on climate change would you support?
Erickson: Well, there was a bill last week, again, that was a critical bill, and it was the Restore Our Forest Act. My opponent here, Andrea Salinas, voted “No” on it. I was shocked when other members, even Nancy Pelosi – one of the most liberal members of Congress – voted for it, because she knows how devastating all the forest fires have been in Northern California. She voted for this. I’ve talked to so many people in the forest business here … in the timber industry. They are devastated by what’s going on out there. Some of the biggest raging forest fires are hitting our state and still running right now, going on.
But Andrea Salinas voted “No” to the Restore Our Forest Act, which would provide federal dollars immediately, to help rebuild these forests, replant and also give the firefighters the resources to keep putting these fires out earlier. Why? I’m just scratching my head. Why, Andrea Salinas, knowing that we’re here in Oregon, would vote, “No” to this Act. I’m shocked and surprised. I’d like to hear her answer why she would vote no to this.
Miller: Andrea Salinas, you’re welcome to answer that question, and more broadly, I would also like to hear what you would want to do on climate change. But, first, if you want to respond to the specific question about this Act.
Salinas: Yes. So, the Act, actually, to my opponent’s point, the funding piece, there was no funding in this bill, and I was worried that, like other things … like Measure 110, where they didn’t put any funding into it, that it was not actually going to do what it said it was going to do. So I couldn’t vote for this until I knew that we were actually gonna have some real dollars behind it.
The Civilian Conservation Center Enhancement Act is a bill that I brought forward. It would actually provide the Forest Service the ability to hire personnel directly from Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers to make sure we have additional wildland firefighting and land management personnel addressing our wildfires right now. I also have been a big advocate of giving greater authority to the Forest Service and land management agencies to address hazardous trees around power lines in high risk areas, to reduce the risk of man-made fire events. We also need to make sure that we extend the authority to the Forest Service to remove any of the dead fuel on our forest floors.
These are all of the types of things that I have been working towards. We do not need to roll back NEPA and ESA, which is essentially what this bill also would have done, in order to address wildfire fighting. We need resources. I was actually a lead member of a bill to start to monitor the carbon and greenhouse gas impacts of timber production. I had both the environmental groups as well as the timber groups come to me and say, “We need this. We need to know what we’re measuring.” The bill also would have increased greater access for the Wood Innovation Grant Program, so that we can increase our economy and what we do best, which is a lot of natural resource programs that can build sustainable timber.
So there are a number of different things that we could be doing right now, but making sure that we address climate change is a big one. We know that a lot of these wildfires and the wildfire season is starting off sooner, it’s going later and the fires are more intense. And in order to address that, we need to address climate. And so it’s a reason why I believe that we need to keep the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act to give our agricultural industries the tools that they need to be a part of the climate solution.
Miller: We have about three minutes left, so a minute-and-a-half for each of these, and we’re going to end with health care. Andrea Salinas, first. What are your priorities in terms of health care …
Erickson: If I can just comment on one thing …
Miller: No, you can respond to that in just a second. But, Andrea Salinas, your priorities in terms of health care?
Salinas: Thank you. Every Oregonian should have access to affordable, high-quality health care, period. And this is one of the things that drove me as a State Representative. And last Congress, we saw some great progress with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Thousands of Oregonians will see the cost of their insulin and other prescription drugs go down. Congress actually capped the cost of insulin. And Medicare is starting to negotiate prices and bring down the cost of some of the most expensive drugs on the market right now.
But there is still a lot of work to do. We know this, and especially in the mental health arena, which I have really been fighting for. So making sure, again, that people have the providers that they need … which is why I was about to say earlier that I have brought forward a bill to add some scholarship money for those who want to go into the behavioral health and addiction fields. I’ve also co-sponsored legislation to rein in the influence of pharmacy benefit managers. We know that those types of entities, rather than bringing down the cost of prescription drugs – which initially was what they were intended to do – have served as a middleman that actually adds a layer, sometimes, of extra cost to pharmaceuticals.
But we know that health care can only be as good as it’s available, and we need to make sure that rural communities also have that availability. So, I’ve actually introduced a bill to make sure that our rural communities can take advantage of telehealth. We know farmers, fishers and forestry folks have an extra hard time. Like I said, their costs are continuing to increase. They’re going into debt year after year, and not having access to rural mental health is a big issue …
Miller: Mike Erickson, last minute-and-a-half to you. You can talk both about health care, and I think you want to respond about climate change as well.
Erickson: Well, as a businessman who provides health insurance to his employees, a lot of small businesses are in the same boat as I am. This year, our health care costs are going up 15%. Our co-pays are going from $20 to $30. You know, we fight hard every year when I get these increases from our providers, whether it be your vision healthcare, whether it be your regular doctors part of it, or whether it be for the dental part of it.
We have a really good healthcare program that we work every day … and I realize that other businesses are dealing with the same struggles as I am. So we have to do everything we can to make sure our healthcare costs are affordable for our employees. And for those that don’t work for companies that are more independent, make sure the resources are out there for them to have affordable health care, through the networks that are out there. We deal with this every day.
But back to some of the questions that Andrea Salinas said, why she won’t vote for that one bill … there was a funding mechanism tied to it. I mean, I saw that on there, so I’m not sure what she was saying, there was no funding mechanism. That’s not true.
Then the other thing that I want to bring up is, back to the environment, about our economics here, providing a road is critical to this whole community here. But going out and putting tolling and voting for tolling … Andrea Salinas, as a State Representative for last year, voted for tolling, had up to a $3 or $4 toll on every person who uses the I-5, I-205, to help fund all the construction, is just wrong, coming out of COVID ...
Miller: Mike Erickson and Andrea Salinas, we are out of time, and I want to be fair to both of you in terms of time, but thanks very much both of you for joining us. That’s Mike Erickson, Republican challenger for Oregon’s 6th Congressional District; and Andrea Salinas, the incumbent Democratic Representative for Oregon’s newest Congressional district.
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