Tom Forest
Candidate for:
State Representative - HD 31
What drives me to seek an elected position
I’m running because I feel furious at a reactionary, authoritarian party that is threatening us for noncompliance with their illegal shenanigans. They’re sending anonymous employees to kill Americans, building concentration camps to promote ethnic purity, swindling us out of our taxpayer money and spending billions for bombs, pennies for plows while committing war crimes. They’re a party that values blind malignant loyalty to Mammon and DJT over serving the people who have elected them.
I want to help protect Oregon from the GOP. I want to take the strength of my feelings and be constructive and mindful about them. I want a broader synthesis of our challenges and longer term responses and solutions than I currently see in the legislature. I’ve been sitting in the spectator seats long enough. It’s time to get into the game and help fight the plutocrats and authoritarians.
The first three priorities or issues I want to tackle
Short term, making up for budget shortfalls caused by Federal legislation is the most important issue. I’d like to selectively raise tax revenue, starting with basing corporate taxes on worldwide combined reporting.
Medium term, the most important issue is education, in funding our schools well to give our children better opportunities and make employers want to come here to hire Oregonians. I’d like us to fund all unfunded mandates and remove any mandates we can’t fund.
Long term, the most important issue is the environment. Global heating will flood every coastal city in the world in a century, unless we take action now. Let’s build on HB 2021, adding a requirement in the law for utilities to retire renewable energy certificates.
More broadly, I’d like to explore creating a process improvement committee. This was the heart of my professional career as a software engineer. There is a Continuous Improvement Advisory Committee working with the Oregon Transportation Commission. I’d like a similar committee with broader scope to examine longer-duration, multistep and especially multi-agency processes that people and companies have to navigate.
The committee would interview representatives of each role involved in a process and design solutions with each role in mind.
The experiences and insights I will bring to the office
I have a science degree in management from MIT and a career as a software engineer. I’m also a Hillsboro High School graduate whose family roots go 145 years deep into Oregon history (since my great-granduncle Simon Benson arrived in 1880) and who, living three miles up a gravel road, knows rural Oregon life.
To work as a legislator, I’d use the Agile software development process that I’ve used for many years. It starts with talking to all the stakeholders and understanding the presenting problem and its underlying issues, giving everyone a chance to make sure they are heard. Next, we prioritize the issues, estimate the level of effort to address each aspect and re-prioritize accordingly. We have daily team meetings, weekly stakeholder meetings and continuous online updates.
I have relevant technology and management knowledge, skills and experience that my primary opponent and GOP incumbent both lack. They also both have day jobs, which I do not, so I have more time to invest.
My experience with the Banks School District is modest, but it’s been 15 years now that I’ve been on the Budget Committee, chairing the committee for the last few years.
What being a Democrat in Multnomah County means to me
Only Multnomah County precinct 3101 is part of my district, HD 31. It has about 4% of the district’s voters and includes the southern half of Sauvie Island and the piece of the county north of Forest Park. As a rural precinct, its main concerns differ significantly from Portland’s many urban and suburban precincts where most people live. That said, I think environmental sustainability, government accountability and political empowerment resonate. I hope to have a town hall there to learn more directly.
Being a Democrat means that I balance the short-term focus of corporations with the long-term focus of families.
Being a Democrat means that I think that people are people, regardless of the particulars of their heritage or identity, and they should be treated the same. We all laugh and cry, eat and sleep, love and hate. Being a Democrat means that I want to start with an emotional connection and move to an intellectual solution to issues and problems as they present—to use emotional intelligence, social skills and critical thinking skills to collaborate on moving forward together.
As a Democrat I believe that America shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.