Rep. Knute Buehler holds town hall in Bend

State Rep. Knute Buehler, R-Bend, addressed a variety of issues during a town hall at St. Charles Medical Center in Bend Friday night.

He began by outlining what he called the most important things he’s working on in Salem this session — which included education, health care, poverty and fixing our “broken” political system.

One crowd-pleaser was the topic of redistricting — Buehler wants to mitigate “gerrymandering” by taking redistricting duties out of the hands of the parties and giving it to a neutral group.

He opened it up for questions after that, and several of them had to do with the low corporate taxes in Oregon. Not everyone was impressed by his answers, and wanted to see him address it more directly.

One community activist thinks it could be a solution to the state’s spending problems.

“A serious, serious taxation of wealthy people and wealthy corporations,to me is really the only way out of the revenue problem that the state has,” Dave Stranahan said.

Buehler also was asked about reproductive and gun rights, and got better crowd responses from his answers to those. He is known for being one of the few pro-choice Republicans in the Oregon Legislature.

U.S. Rep. Greg Walden will hold a town hall in Bend April 13, and Senator Ron Wyden will be in town later that week on the 17th. Details are in the adjacent Related Stories sidebar.