Vote Emerson Levy for House District 53

In this race we have two elected officials and working parents who are passionate about creating the best-possible community they can. Keri Lopez is a Redmond home builder who serves on the Redmond School Board; Emerson Levy is a Bend attorney who is rounding out her first term as the state representative for House District 53. Lopez told us that she’s running due to a curiosity about local issues — including housing, mental health in schools and out-of-control permit times — and a dissatisfaction with politics on the national stage. Levy talked of her passion for public service and her past legislative achievements, including rewriting Oregon foreclosure law and reforming insurance law in the state.

When asked about priorities in the state legislature, Levy talked about a need to increase mental health beds for youth. She detailed the issues for local emergency rooms who have very few resources to handle youth mental health emergencies. Other priorities for Levy included continuing to tackle Oregon’s opioid crisis by looking at what’s worked in other locales — citing Michigan’s non-opioid medical directive as a potential upstream prevention measure she’d like to work on. She’s also keen to address energy policy at the state level, considering local data centers’ increasing energy demands and the need for a balanced energy plan.

Lopez focused on mental health, too, but perhaps in a less-focused way. She mentioned how schools are ill-equipped to handle mental health issues in schools, and how chronic absenteeism continues to be a major problem. But when asked how she, in her work on the school board, had worked to address the issue of absenteeism, Lopez was vague. We’d like to see more detailed answers that demonstrate how she plans to port her work on the school board into advocacy at the legislative level.

We found a similar concern around the issue of permit times. While she’s not wrong that in places like Bend, and Redmond to a lesser extent, developers continue to lament the permit process as a budget-killer, we would have liked to see more developed ideas about how to solve the issue – and more specifically, how she, as a prospective legislator, would address the problem at the state level. Her ideas demonstrated a knowledge and willingness to learn, but compared to Levy’s detailed answers about how she’s working — or plans to work on — these issues, Lopez was simply less prepared.

Asking voters to replace an incumbent with someone new is not unheard of — but it has to come with some big teeth. Show voters the problem, and then give them some good, solid ideas about how to solve them. It’s easy to criticize; harder to come up with solutions that aren’t campaign-time platitudes. For that reason, we’re sticking with Levy on this one.

We’d also be remiss in not mentioning walkouts. Lopez was not definitive about whether she’d walk out, as her Republican colleagues have done numerous times in recent years. (To be fair, Democrats also walked out over 20 years ago.) Voters have been clear about this issue, voting to disqualify legislators with more than 10 unexcused absences, and we see it as a bare minimum to commit to doing the job you want voters to give you.

In this race, Levy appears more prepared and ready to continue the work she’s begun over the past two years. Vote Emerson Levy for House District 53.

This article appears in Source Weekly October 10, 2024.