KOIN 6 News contacted candidates who are planning to run for Oregon governor in 2022, asking them to respond to these three questions:

  • Why are you running for governor? 
  • In your opinion, what are the top three issues Oregon is facing right now? 
  • What is something you believe is going right in Oregon and how would you like to continue to build on it?

Stan Pulliam is running as a Republican. Here are his responses:

Why are you running for governor? 

I’ve been honored to serve as the mayor of my hometown of Sandy. As mayor, when these devastating lockdowns came during the holiday season of 2020 and I looked into the eyes of our community business owners’, I could see that these were my classmates. These were people who I’d grown up with. These are parents of kids who go to school with our kids. And when I looked them in the eyes, I saw desperation, I saw fear. I saw those same eyes of my mom and dad who are small business owners looking back at me.

MacKensey and I have kids in public schools and we’re still working parents. We’ve seen the ramifications of virtual and hybrid learning on our kids. Now is the time to empower our parents and our school boards more than ever. But more importantly, I think we’ve stood at a cross section with the weight and responsibility of our community: as parents with kids, as someone who stood up and funded our police to make sure that we had safe communities here in Sandy, we had a light lit underneath us to really stand up and engage and run for governor so that we can get our home state of Oregon back on track.

In your opinion, what are the top three issues Oregon is facing right now? 

It sounds cliché, but it has to be our education system. Our children are our future. And you think about where our schools have ranked nationally, 46 out of 50 in education, 47 out of 50 in graduation rates, and this was before COVID-19. It was before the shutdowns. And how do our politicians decide to get us back on track? They make our kids last to return to the classroom. We need school choice. We need to empower our parents and our local school boards. We’ve got to get our children caught up and back on track so they can thrive.

Of course you can’t live here in Oregon without seeing the mass homelessness and the riots and the violence. More people were murdered per capita in Portland in 2021 than ever before in our state’s history. We have to stand up for our local police departments and county sheriffs. We’re going to triple the size of the state police and we need to get our national guard back onto the front line. They’re certainly up to the task. We need to do something about our homelessness and the mass violence and riots and crime going out throughout our state. 

Lastly, we’ve got to stand up for our local small business owners and ignite the economic sector in this state to make sure that our economic commerce is moving. We have areas like Coos Bay where we could get a private investment through projects like Jordan Cove which would make it the largest deep-sea water port on the west coast. You think about the log jams and logistics of what’s going on during the holiday season, of people not able to get their goods. There’s no reason why Oregon can’t lead the way in our economic sector.  

So I’d have to say education for our kids, returning law and order to the streets of our local communities, and igniting our small businesses and our economic sector here in Oregon. 

What is something you believe is going right in Oregon, and how would you like to continue to build on it?

From our children going to schools ranked nearly last in every category in education, to the violence and destruction going on in our communities throughout Oregon, not a lot is going right. But what I’d have to say is encouraging is that people are more engaged in our public process than ever before. We have parents throughout this state who are engaged at the local school board level and in the curriculum that’s in our kids’ education system. We have people standing up and demanding accountability and supporting our local police departments across the state. Oregonians are engaged and they’re ready to take our state back and that’s why I’m so encouraged by this upcoming election. Sometimes you have to hit the bottom in order to stand up and get your state back on track, and we’re incredibly excited when we talk to people across the state about their level of engagement and getting us right back on course.  

Editor’s Note: KOIN 6 News originally published an exact transcript of video responses Stan Pulliam submitted in response to our questions. His campaign since requested to edit the sentence structure of the responses and KOIN replaced the wording. While the sentences were edited, Pulliam’s campaign did not change any points or facts stated in the original responses.

Stan Pulliam’s campaign manager said the statistics Pulliam used about Oregon’s education rankings are from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 23rd Annual Report Card on American Education. His campaign manager also clarified the comment about the Port of Coos Bay becoming the largest deep-sea water port in the west coast, saying it would be one of the largest deep-sea water ports on the west coast, not the largest. KOIN News confirmed this with the Port of Coos Bay. They said the channel modification project that the port has been working on for about the last 15 years will make the Port of Coos Bay the largest coastal deep water port between San Francisco and Puget Sound. 

KOIN 6 News made minor adjustments to spelling, capitalization and punctuation in the responses the gubernatorial candidates submitted.