For a better Oregon... Kroger for AG

This is the first in a series about why I've chosen to support certain candidates for office. Today's segment is on John Kroger, who is running for Oregon's Attorney General.

Last year, I had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one with candidate John Kroger and talk to him about the Attorney General's office, where I saw things that needed to change, what he wanted to do in the AG's office, etc.

Right from the beginning, Kroger was friendly and a great listener. He listened to what I had to say, and then told me his goals for the office and how he thought the issue should be approached.

One of my biggest issues has been consumer protection.

We have one loan bill that we're behind on by one payment (it's a long story that I won't go into now...).

So, every month we get calls from the lender regarding the late payment. And I'm not talking about a call a week, or even a call a day. I'm talking about up to 40 calls per day, every day. Sometimes minutes apart. When I do talk to them on the phone, they refuse to stop the calls unless we're caught up.

There are national and state laws to stop this kind of harassment. However, they only apply to outside collection companies. If a lender (or hospital, credit card company, or whatever) start their own internal collection process, they are exempt.

So they can call all day, every day, yell at you, keep your phone tied up, threaten you, etc. (all things outlawed for outside collection companies), and there is nothing that can be done. This was confirmed by the federal agency that deals with these complaints as well as the Oregon Attorney General's office. Apparently it's a loophole. Companies used to outsource much of this, but now they've gone internal since it means they don't have to worry about the law and its consequences. Right now, if an external company called me 40 times a day, they could see fines for every call, have to pay restitution to me, etc.

When I brought up this situation, Kroger listened closely, asking questions throughout. Once I was done, he said this was an example of how he thinks the AG office could change. Updates need to be made to laws to fill loopholes, new rules need to be added, etc. The AG should be pro-active on these things, going to the legislature with updates to laws and new laws that need to be passed (much like Secretary of State Bill Bradbury does). He understood that times change, and people and companies can find ways around laws, and therefore they need to be kept up-to-date.

It impressed me that he understood this, as it's not something the current AG's office seemed to care about (I asked them why the law hadn't been updated, since these practices were obviously supposed to be covered by the law, and I could not get an answer).

Beyond listening to what my biggest concern was, Kroger told me about his plans around identity theft, drug use, environmental protection, and more.

Living in an apartment complex, identity theft is a constant worry for me. We have those large groupings of mailboxes that are easy to break into. Not only that, but the key for each box is not unique - each key opens multiple boxes in each bank of boxes. So it's not uncommon for mail to just disappear - or selected pieces to disappear, as some smarter thieves realize you'll notice if all the mail is gone.

Environmental protection has also been a long-time issue of mine. As a young girl and teenager, I was involved in environmental groups. My winning science project was on acid rain, its causes, and its effects on plants. A bayou runs alongside the back of our family's property in Texas, and on multiple occasions we had men in special suits pumping toxic substances out of the bayou that had been dumped during the night. We lived in a rural area, so it wasn't that hard to go to a place where no one would see them dumping substances into the bayou.

Extremely rare types of cancer would make their way through our community. One was a good friend's mother. Others were teenage girls that I knew and were friends with - they all died of a rare bone cancer within months of each other. Cancer clusters in this part of Texas are the norm, not the exception.

Not too far from where we lived was the Brio Site, one of the nation's Superfund sites. This location had all types of toxic materials under ground. An entire community was built on top of it, including a school, fire station, etc. People began getting sick, and they found out the chemicals were leeching into everything in the community. These people couldn't sell their homes and move - plus there was little they could take with them, including furniture and clothes.

Starting in the late 90s, we started having brown days. At first, it was a few here and a few there. It was like there were fires burning in the distance, causing a very noticeable brown haze. Then it got so bad that the haze went on for days and weeks at a time. This wasn't smog like we get in the Willamette Valley on warm days or when the wind dies down during the cold winter. The sky turned brown at the horizon and went a good halfway up or more. It very much looked like there were fires burning constantly in the distance, filling the sky with dark brown smoke.

Schools in Houston bought meters to tell them when it was safe for kids to play outside. Anyone with asthma or other breathing problems were encouraged to stay indoors with the windows shut. Going outside didn't mean a bit of irritation when you breathed - for some it could mean death.

Houston was exceeding air pollution levels set by the EPA on an average of 4-5 times a month. These are levels you're allowed to exceed three times in four years, and they were going over between 45 and 60 times a year. Other Texas cities, Dallas-Ft. Worth, El Paso, Austin, San Antonio, etc., weren't far behind. And why were things allowed to get so bad? Oh yea, that's right - George Bush had been governor for years and didn't care about things like pollution. The EPA and Bush had been in fights for years over Texas and its pollution. Rules were ignored, companies never fined. And of course, with it being expensive to make their companies more environmentally friendly, they were going to pollute as long as they were allowed to get away with it.

In 2000, I moved to Oregon. I'd visited with my husband in 1997 and 1999, as he grew up in Sandy, Oregon and his family lives here. When we had the opportunity to move to Oregon, I jumped at it. I'd loved how green things were, how committed to the environment people were, and the like. Imagine my surprise to find out the true status of things. The Willamette is so polluted that it has problems with high mercury levels, human waste, etc. Currently there are 82 such sites listed for Oregon - there were 252 in all of Texas (just over three times as many). But there are 20.85 million people in Texas - only 3.42 million people in Oregon. Texas is second in the nation in both population and size. The Houston area has 5.63 million people by itself. In land area they're closer in ratio (268,820 square miles to 98,466 sq mi), but Texas has a huge pollution creating industry - such as the oil refineries in Texas City, Houston, Pasadena, and Baytown. So how could a state so much smaller, without all the refineries, and with a bigger environmental crowd have so much pollution, I wondered.

That's when I found out that things weren't so different between Texas and Oregon. Companies who were doing the polluting had often been doing it for a long time. They'd seen little to no real consequences to their action, and therefore kept doing it.

Kroger talked about how he wanted to change that. He too comes from Texas, so I know that he understands what can happen when pollution is allowed to go unchecked. He wants to give real consequences to polluting. Go after them when they pollute, make them clean it up, and bring criminal charges when needed.

I want my daughter to be able to grow up in a cleaner and better environment than I did. If actions like those above aren't taken soon, I don't think that is possible.

By the end of the discussion, I was seriously considering voting for Kroger. But I still needed to learn a little more about the race, do some consideration over time, etc. But the more I learned, the more evident it became clear that things would continue as they have if Kroger isn't our next Attorney General.

Oregon can't afford to have things continue as they are. It needs John Kroger as its next Attorney General.

Technorati Tags: