Bev Stein has lived in Oregon since 1976 and is a lawyer. She was elected as an Oregon state representative in 1988, serving three terms in the legislature before resigning in 1993 to run for Multnomah County Chairwoman. She won that election and was reelected twice before resigning to run for governor in 2001. She received her law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1976. Stein lives in Portland.
Q: What experience do you bring to the table that makes you a unique candidate for governor?
A: Well one is I’ve actually run a large government. I ran the third-largest government in the state, Multnomah County, which meant that I developed seven budgets, presented them to the Multnomah Board of County Commissioners and negotiated those budgets through the budget process and also managed 5,000 employees.
I think the other distinction I have is I have a great deal of policy experience in exactly the issues the state works on. I ran a very large health system in Multnomah County with nine health clinics. I was the chair of the local public safety coordinating council, so I was deeply involved in the policies regarding coordinated public safety systems and managed parts of that. I also did a lot of work in working with schools. I have the most experience of any of the Democrats working on education issues.
Q: Why should students take an interest in this primary election, and how are you campaigning to increase student turnout?
A: We have contacts on 16 campuses, Students for Stein. We’ve had students tabling at the student union for months and months, helping people register to vote and telling them about me. We will be identifying who will vote for me then make sure they vote.
Q: Would you back initiatives to raise tuition at Oregon universities beyond the 3 percent a year cap?
A: I’m really looking at a restructuring of the governance of higher education. And I want to replace the board of higher education and the chancellor’s office with a five-person commission that would provide a few goals for the (Oregon) University System and allow each university to have their own board. However, one area I want to maintain control of through this commission is the issue of tuition raises, so that there would be control over tuition. And I would see that this commission is where the decision would be made on how much tuition would go up. If you give control to local universities, one thing they could do is just jack up tuition rates as a way of making money. The legislature or commission needs to maintain some cap on tuition increases.
Q: Do you support higher pay for university faculty?
A: Given the budget situation we’re in now, I can’t go around promising anything. Yes, I think that university professors in Oregon aren’t paid what they should be paid, especially compared to other professors around the country. But I’m not promising to put money into anything, because we have a budget shortfall.
Q: How do you plan on helping students afford college when scholarship funding in this state is being cut?
A: We need to have access to scholarships, not only to University students but to community college students. It really pains me when I hear that community college students are funding their education on credit cards. We need to have a fund, and we need to figure out how to fund it so we have access to scholarships based on merit and need.
Q: Oregon Universities are facing record enrollment rates, and at the same time funding is being cut. How should Oregon Universities try to keep a high quality of education?
A: Only 20 to 25 percent of funding for our OUS comes from the state now. The rest comes from tuition or other various other kinds of grants. One of the reasons I think we should change the governance structure is give universities more opportunities to be flexible and come up with new kinds of partnerships and relationships. I think the key here is making sure that we fund the whole continuum of education. If we could get a stable funding source for K-12, that would free up money as the economy improves for higher education and other things that we need.
Q: How do you plan on making yourself accessible to students if you are elected?
A: I have a record of involving students in my administration. When I was at Multnomah County, I created a youth advisory board. I sought the input from those students and got very valuable input. One of the powers of the governor is to appoint people to boards and commissions. I would be very interested in appointing young people to many boards and commissions so they can get a chance to participate and put their best thinking in, because I think young people have a perspective that needs to be heard. They are the co-creators of the future, and they should be respected. You’d find that I would be appointing young people to all kinds of things, not just education-related.
Q: Oregon’s resource-based economy often comes into direct conflict with environmental issues. How do you plan to balance these needs?
A: I think we can take a new approach, which is the approach of sustainable development, and look at how we can reduce waste, clean the environment up and be very careful with our usage of natural resources. An example here in Eugene is where St. Vincent de Paul takes refrigerators out of the waste stream. They take the Freon out and recycle the Freon, then ship the refrigerators overseas. They take waterbeds and cut them up and make them into bookshelves, they melt down glass and make trinkets and provide 250 jobs for disabled people. Now we can think this way much more, in terms of how can we protect the environment and still look for new ways of making jobs out of waste or cleaning up the environment. It’s an important philosophy in terms of bridging this gap.
The other part of that is to recognize that people need to be heard all over the state. And people who are into the natural resources economy need to have their needs heard by everyone just as people in other parts of the state do. There are genuine differences of opinion on how to address things, but there’s also an overlay of people who don’t listen to each other. So I think an important way to do this in terms of watershed health is our watershed council. They bring together diverse people in that watershed, the people that are really stakeholders here — the farmers and the environmentalists. And they work together to identify what they can do to improve the health of the watershed.
Q: In the event of another economic slump, would you be more likely to cut programs or raise taxes to balance the budget?
A: I would have a rainy day fund in place so we don’t have to make those tough choices. I would say that in the last ten years we gave back to people in the kicker $1.1 billion. If we’d put that money back into a rainy day fund and had a trigger on it that said when unemployment goes above 7.5 percent or something like that, that this money would be available, right now we would not have a crisis. And so I’m going to prepare for the next one so we don’t have to make those hard choices.
Q: Do you think Oregon’s education system is adequately preparing students for college?
A: We have not reached excellence. We are good, we are better than most states. But we are not at the level I’d like to see us, where every student graduates from high school prepared to go on even to college or to other kinds of training because I think that is the future for them, in terms of getting a good job and the future of the state’s economy to have them working at that level.
Q: What should this state do to keep Oregon’s top students at in-state colleges and universities?
A: We have to recognize we’re not going to keep every student in state. I don’t think the goal here is to have 100 percent of our students go to universities here. I think it’s healthy for them to go away and come back. But we want them to come back. We should have some areas of excellence, though, where a student
that is considering going onto graduate school or going to college and has choices, that there will be some areas that there’s no question of whether we should stay in state, because we’re so good at them.
Q: U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to overturn Oregon’s death with dignity law in federal court. Will you fight to preserve the will of Oregon’s voters or help the government overturn what some consider to be illegal legislation?
A: I would absolutely be in Ashcroft’s face if necessary to say that Oregonians have voted twice on this issue. I’ve personally voted for it twice. They have no business getting involved in issues that are issues of self-determination for our state. We have decided this is what we want to do, and we have every right to do it, and I will protect our right to do it to the very end.
E-mail reporter Brook Reinhard at [email protected].