Canning, Fragala vie to replace retiring Democrat in Eugene House district

Just months after Eugene voters overwhelmingly decided that they wanted to keep Rep. Paul Holvey as their voice in Salem, they’ll pick his successor in May.

Holvey, the second highest-ranking Democrat in the state House, will retire in January after 20 years in Salem and surviving a rare 2023 recall vote. Democratic voters face a choice between a current legislative staffer, Doyle Canning, and a local community college board member, Lisa Fragala. 

The Eugene-based 8th House District includes the University of Oregon and is one of the state’s most reliably Democratic regions. No Republicans are running. 

The race has had a certain level of intrigue: In April, Democratic voters in the district began receiving texts with links to an online poll with leading questions about the candidates, including information about Fragala’s endorsements – they include Holvey and current and former U.S. Reps. Peter DeFazio and Val Hoyle – and a description of Canning as “extreme and out of touch” and “supported by the small group of Portland state legislators who voted against criminalizing deadly fentanyl and cracking down on public use of hard drugs on our streets.” 

Fragala said she had no involvement with the poll and is committed to running a positive campaign. State campaign finance records don’t yet indicate which candidate or group could have paid for the poll, though some Democrats in the district speculated it’s linked to former Salem Democratic state Rep. Brian Clem’s attempt to elect more moderate Democrats to the statehouse. Clem didn’t return a call about whether the Oregonians Are Ready PAC, which he gave $1 million to earlier this spring, is engaged in the 8th District. But he has clashed with Canning and her boss, progressive Portland Rep. Khanh Pham, over developing Clem’s hometown of Coos Bay. 

Doyle Canning

Canning, 44, has spent the past 20 years as a community organizer and the past two working for Pham in the House. 

“I know what a difference it can make to have a strong champion who has a commitment to the community and can bring a skillful hand to lawmaking,” Canning said. 

If elected, she hopes to serve on committees dedicated to the environment, transportation, health care, behavioral health care, business and labor or housing and homelessness, all of which she described as key issues that need a strong Eugene voice. Canning assisted Pham on the House Climate, Energy and Environment Committee and the Joint Committee on Transportation. 

A transportation policy and funding package is expected to be the biggest issue facing lawmakers in 2025. Canning said climate and transportation policies are intertwined – the Department of Environmental Quality estimates that 35% of statewide emissions are tied to transportation. She wants to see more focus on electric vehicles and mass transit, including more frequent passenger rail service in the Willamette Valley. As someone who lives in Eugene and works in Salem, Canning has tried to use the existing Amtrak line between the two cities and found that it isn’t feasible. 

She also wants to continue legislative work around housing and homelessness, noting that the median home price in Eugene is approaching $500,000 and that the city had the nation’s highest rate of unsheltered homelessness per capita before the COVID pandemic. 

“I think that (Gov. Tina Kotek’s) approach of ‘everything in the kitchen sink’ is necessary, and something I support,” Canning said. “For House District 8, my focus will be specifically on addressing homelessness and making sure that Eugene gets what we need to find solutions to the crisis in terms of housing and also in terms of behavioral health and mental health and health care services.”

She advocates moving toward a single-payer health care system but acknowledged that Oregon and the country are far from that goal. In the short term, Eugene is dealing with the fallout of its only hospital closing late last year. Canning said she supports a law introduced by a bipartisan group of Eugene-area lawmakers earlier this year that provided $4.5 million for Lane County to expand ambulance services and provide emergency health care while thousands of residents dealt with losing their hospital. 

Canning said she has proven her ability to succeed in Salem through her work with Pham, including in 2023 passing a $7 million investment in expanding tree canopies throughout the state to reduce urban heat and improve water quality. 

“I have the support and endorsement for my candidacy from 10 sitting members of the Legislature, who represent diverse communities and viewpoints, and so that really shows my strength as a candidate and as a future legislator to be able to build support for our priorities here in Eugene, beyond Eugene,” she said. 

Canning’s largest donor is the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in the country, which has given her campaign $13,500. She’s also supported by Pham and received $7,500 from Mike Perham, a Lake Oswego software CEO who supports climate and bike causes. 

Lisa Fragala

Fragala, 57, is a longtime elementary school teacher who serves on the Lane Community College Board of Education. She said her nearly 25 years teaching kindergarten and second grade gave her an intimate perspective of the issues facing families in the district.

That includes hearing from families who have to choose between paying rent and paying for their children’s other basic needs. And Fragala has firsthand experience with housing insecurity from her own childhood: Her single mother often worked several minimum wage jobs, and when her mother lost her primary job after an injury, her family lost their home and crashed on the couch or floor at the homes of other friends and family.

“That experience has always made me really aware of how the system works for some people and doesn’t work well for others, and so that is one reason why over the last two decades, I’ve worked as a community organizer, as a housing advocate, as someone who’s really tried to make our community a better place for everyone,” she said.

Now, housing and homelessness are the topics she hears most about while talking with voters. Fragala said she looks forward to vetting suggestions from Kotek’s Housing Production Advisory Council, and she’s most excited about the community land trust model that has been successful in Eugene. That model drives home costs down by having homeowners purchase only the house while a trust owns the land it sits on. 

If elected, Fragala would like to sit on the House committees focused on education, higher education or business and labor. 

 When it comes to transportation, Fragala said she supports focusing on providing options so Oregonians don’t have to rely on cars. She previously served on the board of Better Eugene-Springfield Transportation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for public transit and safer walking and biking routes. 

“We need to be looking at maintaining our roads, but I think we also need to advocate for investments in our communities and our transportation systems that can reduce reliance on automobiles, and I think we need to prioritize safe streets that are designed for multimodal uses of shared spaces,” she said. “We need walkable and bike-friendly communities.” 

She said she supports high-speed rail through the Willamette Valley, which would require federal investment. For other funding, she said the state’s gas tax (40 cents per gallon as of Jan. 1) hasn’t kept pace with inflation and isn’t sufficient as more people transition to driving electric vehicles. And she’s interested in taxes or surcharges that would affect people traveling on highways during peak travel times, though she said she wasn’t sure if that would take the form of tolls with congestion pricing or another type of fee. 

Fragala is also passionate about health care: She was diagnosed last year with breast cancer and is now in remission, and she knows what it was like to navigate the health care system as the local hospital closed and an out-of-state corporation bought the Oregon Medical Group, which employs many local primary care providers. Its new owners have enforced non-compete clauses on doctors who try to leave. Fragala wants to work with the Legislature to ban those non-compete clauses though that may not be necessary: The Federal Trade Commission this week issued a rule banning the clauses that it said “are a widespread and often exploitative practice imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business.

Her largest donor is the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association, which gave her $10,000. A political action committee for the Oregon Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, kicked in $5,000, and Fragala has received thousands from Hoyle and Holvey.