Green challenging Republican Rep. Greg Smith hopes to win with nonaffiliated voters

Political newcomer Josiah Dean’s campaign to unseat Oregon’s longest-serving state representative has been compared, he said, to the parables of David and Goliath or Don Quixote: Characters facing enormous odds and, at times, delusion, to overcome extraordinary challenges.

Dean, 63 and a resident of Dufur, decided to run as the Pacific Green Party’s nominee for the 57th House District seat in north-central and northeast Oregon against 13-term Republican state Rep. Greg Smith when he learned that the Wasco County Democratic Committee had not put up a candidate to run against Smith in a decade.

He officially jumped into the race in July — a privilege afforded to third-party candidates who don’t need to compete in the primary but are nominated by a party committee — and has since been visiting towns across the district. The area is vast and includes Gilliam, Morrow, Sherman and Wheeler Counties as well as parts of Clackamas, Jefferson, Marion, Umatilla and Wasco counties.

In the vein of Quixote, the former hotel owner and current small business adviser thought: “Let me pick up my sword and go after that windmill.”

Smith, from Heppner, has served in the Oregon Legislature for more than 25 years. As a member of the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee, he has during his time in office funneled tens of millions of state economic development dollars into rural and eastern Oregon projects, including projects he was hired to work on through his consultancy, Greg Smith & Company. The latter has put him in hot water with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, which concluded three times in the past year that he violated state ethics laws.

He is also being sued by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield for allegedly helping business associates buy an illegally undervalued internet company through a nonprofit development corporation, raking in millions.

Smith narrowly won his party’s nomination in the May primary over Republican challenger Jim Doherty, a former Morrow County Commissioner.

In response to more than a week of emails, calls and texts, Smith emailed the Capital Chronicle declining an interview.

“Thank you for the opportunity to interview. However, I am going to politely decline the offer due to OCC’s lack of readership in House District 57,” he said.

Although there are twice as many Republicans registered to vote in the district as Democrats, nonaffiliated voters make up more than half of all registered voters in the area, according to the state’s latest voter registration data.

That last group is the one that Dean hopes he can win over. He’s buoyed by Doherty’s numbers, he said.

“Which is quite a statement when you’ve got Republicans voting for this other person that came that close,” he said. “I think I really do have a chance of shaking things up.”

Josiah Dean

Dean has been a longtime member of the Green Party, he said, and the party nominated him to represent Oregon’s committee at the party’s national convention before picking him to run against Smith in July. The group’s platform is built on anti-war, pro-universal health care, pro-parental leave and pro-clean energy values, according to the party website.

Before coming to Dufur with his now ex-wife in 2015, Dean spent his career working in historic hotels across the country “from Alaska to Maine,” he said, including Oregon Caves Chateau, Mount Rainier’s Paradise Inn and Giant Forest Lodge in Sequoia National Park.

They bought the historic Balch Hotel in Dufur in 2015, and Dean was also elected that year to serve on the Dufur City Council, a position he held until 2024. He now works for the Columbia Gorge’s small business development center.

Dean said the first priority if elected would be to rein in the enterprise zone tax breaks going to data centers in the district, where the largest data centers in the state receive hundreds of millions of dollars of tax breaks each year in exchange for commitments to create jobs. Dean said concerns over data centers’ water and energy use, and forgone tax revenue from property tax breaks, are among the issues he hears most about from voters.

“The big corporations are taking advantage of these smaller communities, making big promises when they come in, and then literally destroying the water that people drink,” he said, referring to Amazon’s recent $20.5 million settlement in an ongoing class-action lawsuit against industrial water users at the Port of Morrow, among the sources of groundwater nitrate contamination in Morrow County.

His other priorities include securing more wildfire mitigation and prevention funding for the district, ensuring existing and proposed taxes are not overburdening rural communities, promoting economic opportunities for small businesses and getting entrepreneurship programs at high schools.

“So we can teach our kids that they can make a living in their own communities. They don’t have to go off to some other town and never come back,” he said.

Voters have received him with enthusiasm as he’s traveled through the district and told them he’s running against Smith, he said.

“I went to Mitchell a couple weeks ago, and just kind of walked into the grocery store there and one of my biggest surprises — because I’m thinking Mitchell is the heart of rural Oregon and I’m running against Greg Smith — people cheer,” he said.

Greg Smith

Smith has held enormous political power for a Republican in Oregon during the last few decades, and voters in his district have sent him back to Salem every two years by large margins.

He’s won with more than 66% of the vote in every general election since his first win in 2001, when Republicans controlled both chambers of the Oregon Capitol. He’s gained a reputation among members of both parties as a reliable bipartisan lawmaker willing to make deals with Oregon’s Democratic majority to win concessions for Republicans.

The state’s largest farm, electrical, construction and trade unions, have backed him over the years. Among his largest donors in the current cycle is the Building a Stronger Oregon PAC seeded by carpenters unions, which recently gave him $10,000.

Smith’s largest expense this campaign has been the $3,200 per month, or $23,100 total, he has paid his 28-year-old son Ryan Smith since March for “management services.”

Smith currently serves as co-vice chair of the Joint Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the state budget. He also sits on the Joint Committee On Legislative Administration, Joint Emergency Board, House Interim Committee on Revenue and the Ways and Means subcommittees on capital construction and general government, though he was recently removed as co-chair of the latter for his ethics violations.

‘Up to voters of his district’: Oregon lawmakers mostly silent on Rep. Greg Smith ethics violations

The Oregon Government Ethics Commission fined Smith $12,000 in August for violating state ethics laws and abusing his position as a public official to boost his pay and approve his own vacation time as director of a federally funded public development authority. Smith has denied any intentional wrongdoing.

It followed four investigations into Smith by the commission during the past two years, including two where he was found to have failed to disclose clients of his private consulting company on annual economic interest statements, and for which he was issued letters of education — essentially a formal reprimand. In response to one commission investigation, Smith reported his household income in recent years averaged more than $1 million annually.

Smith has long woven his elected and private consultancy work together in ways that ethics watchdogs have found troubling.

In 2017, Smith championed more than $50 million in state investment in two rail shipping centers in the Willamette Valley and eastern Oregon that promised to reduce truck emissions, boost agricultural exports and save farmers money. Soon after the Legislature approved the funding, Linn and Malheur counties contracted Smith and his consultancy to help their nonprofit economic development groups pitch projects to receive the funds.

Years later, the two rail centers have not lived up to their promise. But Smith made hundreds of thousands of dollars consulting on them.