Who: Jeff Kruse

Home town: Roseburg

Party: Republican

Experience: Kruse was first elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1997. He has served in the Oregon Senate for four years.

Health and mental health: The state’s mental health system is broken, Kruse said. The state is building two new facilities in Salem and Junction City, but he doesn’t think that is enough. He is advocating the state support development of smaller facilities in communities in the system as well.

When it comes to health care, Kruse supports a plan to have state employees pay 25 percent of their own health care costs. That would free up money to expand the Oregon Health Plan to more people who need it.

County funding:  Kruse said the state may be facing a half-billion-dollar shortfall in the next session.

“As bad as the state is, the counties are worse,” he said.

 Though counties have some breathing room with the federal OK to renew timber payments on a temporary and declining basis, future funding will need to come from elsewhere. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Western Oregon Plan Revision proposes to double federal logging in Western Oregon, providing more jobs and money to counties.

“That is a big part of the solution,” he said.

Energy policy: Kruse sees a nuclear future for Oregon and the state should support new development. He contends that future will look nothing like nuclear energy’s past.

“It’s absolutely environmentally clean,” he said. “It’s not nothing like Trojan was, folks.”

LNG: Kruse conceded that Oregon has no siting authority when it comes to siting liquefied natural gas facilities. But, he said, he thinks the state could ensure that safety and environmental standards are met. And if developers use eminent domain to take people’s property in building a natural gas pipeline, the state should see that people are fairly compensated.

Economy: Kruse said Oregon needs to become a friendlier place for businesses offering to bring in family-wage jobs.

That, he said, is essential for communities to prosper.

“If you don’t have growth, you are dying,” Kruse said. “You have to have growth to survive.”