Jeffrey Ricks hopes to bring smaller government in in his race for District 25’s senate seat

Jeffrey Ricks is the Libertarian Party candidate running for the Oregon state Senate position in District 25 currently held by Laurie Monnes Anderson. He is a business owner (he runs a “traditional games” shop), a U.S. Air Force veteran, and this campaign is his first foray into politics.

“Smaller government, more community focused government – that’s the real keystone of why I ran,” said Ricks.

His campaign consists of three points of focus: community organization, the homeless problem, and youth opportunity.

“Big government shouldn’t be solving problems that are best solved by your local community,” said Ricks. He used an example where years passed before a city government finally got a pothole filled, but if the community had the ability, the pothole would have been filled as soon as it became an issue.

“Obviously there should be controls and stuff because you don’t want to pave a thing that the city plans on paving next week, because that is part of government’s job, managing infrastructure,” he said.

When it comes to housing, Ricks believes that people need affordable places to live, but he’s “phenomenally against rent control. Rent control makes it more expensive to live in every aspect of your life,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like the way it should work, but it is.

“With housing… you have a bunch of empty units, and have people asking a price based upon other empty units’ pricing, they’re sitting there empty. So you have empty houses, but you have a homeless population.

“It’s not that people are homeless because they don’t have a job… it’s because they can’t afford that extra $300, $400, $500 a month that the landlords have begun to ask because demand has risen,” Ricks said.

As a landlord, Ricks understands the conflict of needing to offer affordable rates, but knowing he would charge as much as he could, if allowed.

“If I could get $14,000 a month for my unit, I would. I know I’m never going to do that, so I charge reasonable rates, but really it’s a supply and demand thing… and it’s rough. There’s no way to come out of it sounding like a good guy,” he said.

For the most part, Ricks is for deregulation, but not as much when it comes to housing. “Housing is one of the few areas where if it’s not regulated, someone’s going to put in bad, like, wiring and you’re going to burn down the neighborhood – not out of malicious intent, but just because it’s 5 cents cheaper per outlet.”

On education, Ricks said it’s important for students to know why they’re in school. “As far as our high school graduation rates – youth engagement (is needed) – people don’t know why they’re going to school, they can’t figure it out, and we need to re-attack that problem in a way that gets people involved.”

Ricks said that a basic education system where students were necessarily pressured to go to college would be a good idea if it came down to having a national education standard. That’s not the case, he said: “I think part of the problem with the economy and just the millennial, Gen-X generation in general is everyone was pressured to go to college, so you go to college because you were supposed to, and you end up $40-80,000 in debt (with) nothing to show for it.”

Advocate Staff