As Oregon’s 2026 general election approaches, voters in House District 3 are weighing not only the candidates seeking to represent them in Salem, but the priorities, governing philosophies and specific commitments those candidates would carry into the Oregon Legislature.
The Grants Pass Tribune invited candidate Susan Maki to address a series of detailed questions focused specifically on Josephine County and the issues confronting House District 3. The interview covers political independence, government accountability, affordability, homelessness and addiction, economic development, wildfire preparedness, homeowners insurance, rural representation and the measurable results Maki believes voters should expect if she is elected.
Rather than limiting the discussion to campaign themes, the Tribune’s questions asked Maki to explain where she would stand when the interests of her district conflict with those of her political party, what she believes state government can realistically accomplish, and how voters should evaluate her performance after a first term.
The following questions are presented as submitted by the Grants Pass Tribune. Maki’s answers are presented in full, with only minor corrections to grammar and punctuation for publication. Her positions, arguments and substantive responses have not been altered.
Grants Pass Tribune:
You are asking the voters of Oregon House District 3 to place their trust in you and send you to Salem as their state representative. What motivated you to seek this office, what do you believe is currently missing from the district’s representation, and what do you believe you can accomplish for Josephine County that is not being accomplished today?
Fischer-Maki:
Most of life isn’t political. It’s getting the kids to school, caring for aging parents, building a life in a place you love. And the truth is, the system isn’t working for us. I am going to Salem to demand better for Josephine County.
I’ve spent my career on the other side of that counter. I started as a home visitor, sitting in living rooms with new parents. I’ve owned two small businesses, taught at Rogue Community College, and served on the Three Rivers School Board. For the last four years I’ve run a consulting practice that local governments, state agencies, and nonprofits hire to make their systems work better for the people they serve.
By the time a bill reaches the House floor, most of the real work is already finished. The decisions that matter happen earlier, while budgets are being drafted, while language is being negotiated, while an agency is writing the rules that determine who actually qualifies for something. Josephine County needs someone in those rooms.
Over fifteen years I’ve built relationships with legislators and with the agencies that decide how money and programs reach communities like ours. What’s missing today isn’t access to Salem. It’s someone with the standing to use it on our behalf, and I am running to do just that.
I will look closely at what happens to a dollar between the day the Legislature appropriates it and the day it reaches a person in Josephine County. That’s money our community never sees, and it isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a competence issue.
Constituent service will be my team’s highest priority. When a resident, a small business, a nonprofit, or a local government hits a wall with a state agency, they should have a representative who picks up the phone and helps.
And that means all of House District 3. When I say House District 3, I mean Grants Pass, Williams, Cave Junction, and the Illinois Valley, including the communities that hardly ever get named in Salem at all, like Selma and Takilma. Grants Pass is the largest city in this district, but it is not the whole district.
Grants Pass Tribune:
What fundamental principles and values would guide your decisions as a state representative? Are there principles or positions on which you would be unwilling to compromise, even when facing pressure from your political party, legislative leadership, special interests or other influential organizations?
Fischer-Maki:
My principles are simple: tell the truth and remember who I work for. Everything else follows from that.
Let me be direct about the pressure this question is asking about. I’m a Democrat, and I’ll be walking into a building where my party holds the majority. The pressure to fall in line is real, and it comes from people who can make the job easier or harder. I would never vote for something I believed would harm House District 3 because my party or legislative leadership wanted my vote. If that makes the work harder, then the work will be harder.
I’ve already lived this on the record. This spring, when a petition came forward to let individual property owners withdraw from the Josephine Community Library District, I went to the Board of Commissioners and said publicly that it shouldn’t be granted. Letting people opt out one parcel at a time isn’t really about books. It’s a precedent that could impact our fire and community college districts next.
There is one additional principle I want to be especially clear about. This campaign has carried the same idea from the beginning: for women, by women. I will always stand up for the health, safety, dignity, and freedom of women. That means protecting a woman’s ability to make her own healthcare decisions. It also means the unglamorous things that decide whether women can work and raise families here, like childcare that is high quality and close to home, and real support for the people caring for aging parents, which in this district is very often a daughter.
I won’t agree with every person I represent, and they won’t always agree with me. What I owe them is the truth about where I stand, why I decided what I decided, and who I was thinking about when I did.
Grants Pass Tribune:
Josephine County has historically leaned politically conservative, while you are seeking office as a Democrat. If the priorities of Democratic leadership in Salem were to conflict with what you believed was in the best interest of the residents of House District 3, how would you approach that disagreement, and where would your responsibility to your district stand in relation to your responsibility to your party?
Fischer-Maki:
Josephine County comes first.
I’m a Democrat and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’m also running to represent everyone in House District 3, including the people who won’t vote for me and the people who disagree with me. That isn’t a difficult position to hold. It’s the job.
It’s fair to say plainly that the majority in Salem is typically too focused on the Portland metro area, and that policies built for a large city don’t usually fit here. When that happens, I’ll say so, argue for something different, and vote against my own party when that’s what serving this district requires.
None of that is theoretical for me. When the state eliminated the county commissions on children and families and ordered Josephine and Jackson counties to merge into one regional structure, I was at the front of that room. Two counties, very different politics, and a real risk that the smaller one would simply be absorbed. In the end, Josephine County had an equal share of seats on the governance council and our programs maintained their funding. When you put the people being served at the center of the room, you’d be surprised how often the politics fade into the background in the interest of getting things done.
I don’t think independence should be measured by how often a legislator votes no. It should be measured by what they get accomplished for the people they have been elected to serve.
That’s where being in the majority matters for this district, and not as a question of loyalty. It’s proximity. In the majority, you argue while a bill is still being written. In the minority, you mostly object after it’s finished.
My job wouldn’t be to bring Salem’s priorities home to Josephine County. It would be to bring Josephine County’s priorities to Salem, and to come back with something to show for it.
Grants Pass Tribune:
Government accountability and public trust have been identified as priorities of your campaign. Where do you believe Oregon state government is currently falling short in accountability, transparency or responsiveness, and what specific reforms or legislative actions would you support to improve the relationship between state government and the people it serves?
Fischer-Maki:
Accountability starts with me.
Trust isn’t a message. It’s built on three things: character, competence, and communication. I’ve been measured against that standard as a parent, as a business owner, and as the person people call when a system isn’t working for them. I intend to be measured against it in Salem.
So you should be able to reach your representative. It certainly shouldn’t matter how you voted. A representative who only answers the people who already agree with them isn’t representing a district. They’re maintaining a mailing list.
The same standard should apply to state government, and right now it doesn’t. We measure the wrong things: how much was spent, how many meetings were held, how many people were served. Almost never the question that matters, which is whether it worked.
There are three things I’d push to change.
Report results on a schedule communities can use. An annual report landing eighteen months after the fact tells you what happened to people you can no longer help.
Stop making people do the state’s homework. Agencies routinely ask communities to report information the state already holds, the same numbers collected twice, by people who could have spent those hours serving somebody. That isn’t transparency. Transparency is when the government does that work and hands you the answer.
Make it possible for people here to be heard. Testifying in Salem means being available during a specific committee window on a specific weekday. The people most affected by a bill are usually the least able to take a Tuesday off and drive four hours. A good part of my career has been spent teaching people how their own government works. A door that’s technically open isn’t worth much if nobody has told you where it is.
Grants Pass Tribune:
The cost of housing, utilities, insurance, groceries, transportation, taxes and other necessities continues to place financial pressure on working families, seniors and small businesses. What actions do you believe the Oregon Legislature can realistically take to improve affordability and economic stability without creating additional financial burdens for residents and employers?
Fischer-Maki:
I hear from voters every day how the cost of living is hitting people in Josephine County right now. Seniors are being priced out of the places they live and are having to make painful decisions at a time they deserve to be enjoying life. Our median household income is around $59,700, against roughly $85,200 statewide.
I’m a small-business owner raising a family here and helping my parents age here, so I understand the urgency. The Legislature cannot vote to make groceries or lumber cheaper. What it can do is stop making life unnecessarily more expensive, and go after the costs state policy actually touches.
The question I’ll ask about every bill is simple: what will this cost a household, a small business, or a small provider in Josephine County, and does anyone in the building know the answer? This is one area where I agree with Republican leaders. Our days of asking for more need to be over, and we need to make state revenue go farther.
Utilities deserve their own mention, because the reason costs are climbing isn’t obvious. A significant share of what it costs to build energy projects in this state has been covered by federal tax credits, and those credits are ending. When that support disappears, the cost lands in rates.
We also have to stop writing policy as though everyone is thirty-five and commuting. Josephine County’s median age is 46, against about 41 statewide, and close to a third of the people here are on Medicare. It means a fixed income meeting a rising property tax bill, and Oregon’s main tool for that is a deferral program that puts a lien on your house, which for a lot of people isn’t relief. It’s a trade against what they hoped to leave their kids. It means prescription costs, where Oregon created a Prescription Drug Affordability Board and then never gave it the authority to finish the job. And it means getting to a medical appointment when you no longer drive.
Housing and infrastructure are where the state can make the most direct difference, and we’ve seen it here. State investment helped move the Allenwood Village housing development forward and extended the sewer serving the Spalding Industrial Park. These are bipartisan wins, and I’ll say plainly that Representative Dwayne Yunker deserves credit for his part in bringing those resources home. When something is good for Josephine County, I don’t care whose name is on it.
Homeowners insurance is now an affordability problem as much as a wildfire problem. The Grants Pass Fire Department is working toward an ISO Class 1 rating, one that no community in Oregon has held. Right now a department can do everything right and a homeowner still won’t see it reflected on their bill. I’d work on closing that gap.
Grants Pass Tribune:
Josephine County continues to confront difficult and interconnected issues involving homelessness, addiction, behavioral health, crime, public safety and limited government resources. What role should state government play in addressing these challenges, what responsibilities should remain with local government, and how should personal responsibility factor into the policies Oregon adopts?
Fischer-Maki:
Josephine County understands its own challenges better than Salem does. My job would be to bring the resources home, back the people already doing the work, insist we measure whether anyone is actually reaching stability, and then let a community that has been solving hard problems without much help get on with it.
I don’t believe we have to choose between compassion and accountability. We can help someone struggling with addiction, mental illness, or homelessness and still expect people to follow the law and respect the safety of everyone around them.
Oregon also has to be willing to learn from its mistakes. I disagreed with Measure 110, and its implementation did real damage to communities like ours. Decriminalizing hard drugs before the state had anything close to the treatment capacity to back it up was the wrong way to get there. Good intentions aren’t enough. Policy has to work in the real world.
We also need to stop treating homelessness, addiction, behavioral health, and criminal behavior as if they’re one thing. Being homeless is not a crime. At the same time, addiction or homelessness cannot excuse violence, theft, or behavior that makes public spaces unsafe for everyone else.
The question asks about personal responsibility, and I’ll answer it directly. Recovery isn’t something the state can do to a person. Treatment works when someone participates in it, and no amount of funding replaces that decision. What government can do is make sure the door is open on the day someone is finally ready to walk through it, because the cruelest thing we do right now is tell a person who has decided to get help that there’s a waiting list. Accountability runs the other direction too. If someone is committing crimes, the consequence should be real, whether or not they’re sick.
The state’s job is stable funding for behavioral health, addiction treatment, recovery services, and housing, and then getting those resources to this community and getting out of the way. Where Salem consistently fails is implementation. We have to move at the pace of communities.
That freedom carries an obligation on our end, and I’ll say it plainly: it only works if our local leaders are willing and able to take the resources, manage them, and answer for what happens next. It isn’t enough for the state to offer. We have to be ready to say yes and then deliver.
But law enforcement cannot be our behavioral health system, and we shouldn’t keep asking officers to be the last resort for a problem that started somewhere else.
We should also be honest about what counts as evidence. Numbers matter. So does what a shelter worker sees at two in the morning, and what the person being served says about whether it actually helped. The people who could tell us what’s working here are already here, doing it. We should be asking them.
Grants Pass Tribune:
Economic development and workforce training are among the issues you have emphasized during your campaign. What types of industries, employment opportunities and investments would you like to see developed or expanded in Josephine County, and what could you accomplish as a state representative to help existing businesses grow, attract new employers and create opportunities that encourage younger residents to build their futures here?
Fischer-Maki:
Josephine County shouldn’t be waiting for one big employer to arrive and transform our economy. We should be building on the strengths we already have, and making it possible for new businesses to grow here.
We’re starting from behind. Our unemployment rate was around 8 percent early this year, against roughly 5 percent statewide. Closing it will take more than optimism. It requires places to live, places to build, and infrastructure in the ground.
State investment works when it shows up. We’ve watched it here, in housing like Hillcrest Veterans Village, Nebraska Trail, and Allen Creek Crossing. What I can do as a representative is advocate for infrastructure dollars and help our cities, our county, and our developers get projects through Business Oregon and the land use and transportation agencies, so that a good project doesn’t die waiting in a queue.
I see real potential in an outdoor recreation economy that goes well past tourism. SOTAR shows what our rivers can support: recreation and manufacturing in the same town. I believe we have the opportunity to be the premier place in Oregon for people with disabilities and for seniors to enjoy everything this landscape offers, and that’s the benchmark I’d hold all of it to.
The workforce has to be part of this. The Allied Health training center at the Redwood Campus is exactly the model: local training for jobs that exist here. I’m also concerned that our regional Small Business Development Center lost its home at RCC when state funding didn’t keep pace. A business owner with a question needs somewhere to walk in.
This community has already done the planning. The vision and the implementation plans already exist. Your representative’s job is not to arrive with a new one. It’s to listen to what people here have already decided they want, then open the pathways and clear the barriers so it can happen.
The challenge in Josephine County has never been a shortage of assets. It’s turning those assets into businesses, into careers, and into reasons for our kids to picture a future for themselves right here.
Grants Pass Tribune:
Wildfire, emergency preparedness, forest management and the availability and affordability of homeowners insurance have become increasingly important concerns throughout Southern Oregon. What policies would you support to reduce wildfire risk, improve forest health, strengthen emergency response and protect homeowners while respecting private property rights and the economic realities facing rural communities?
Fischer-Maki:
Wildfire, forest health, emergency preparedness, and homeowners insurance are not four separate problems. They’re one system, and we’ve been paying for it at the most expensive end. Almost everything that determines how a fire season goes here is decided before a fire starts.
The fire map fight is over, and I think ending it was right. But repealing something is not the same as fixing it. What replaced the map is a model defensible space code the State Fire Marshal finished this May, which cities, counties, and fire districts may adopt if they choose. And the promise that came with the repeal, that insurers would start recognizing the work property owners do, has not been delivered. That’s the unfinished business I’d take to Salem.
On the land itself, I support sustained investment in fuels reduction and forest restoration rather than emergency spending after the fact. That work should include the knowledge of the tribes whose people have tended this landscape far longer than Oregon has existed.
That work also got harder this year. The federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, one of the few funding sources dedicated to work done before a disaster rather than after, has been eliminated. That is exactly backwards from where the money should be going.
Here’s the piece I’d fight for hardest, because I don’t think anyone else is talking about it. Fire is a science, and we can teach it here. An associate-level fire program at Rogue Community College, built alongside our prescribed burn associations and OSU Extension, would mean young people trained for year-round work in fuels crews, prescribed burning, defensible space assessment, and mitigation, instead of a seasonal job and a long drive. That is a workforce strategy, an economic development strategy, and a wildfire strategy in a single move.
We also have to be honest about local capacity. What we don’t have is OSU Extension forestry, the program that teaches a private woodland owner how to do this work on their own ground. If defensible space is voluntary now, then education and outreach to private landowners isn’t a nice extra. It is the entire delivery system. We repealed the mandate and then let the thing that was supposed to replace it sit vacant.
And homeowners, I hear you loud and clear. Telling a family they need several thousand dollars of work around their house isn’t helpful if we don’t give them a realistic way to pay for it. I’d rather put real money into defensible space assistance for the people least able to front it, especially seniors on fixed incomes and working families, than pass a requirement and call it done. I want mitigation efforts to count. If a homeowner clears their five feet and does everything asked, that should show up in what they pay. Right now it mostly doesn’t.
Grants Pass Tribune:
Oregon is politically, economically and geographically diverse, and residents of Southern Oregon sometimes express concern that statewide policies are developed primarily around the priorities and circumstances of the Portland metropolitan area. Where do you believe state government may misunderstand the needs of Josephine County and rural Oregon, and what would you do as a legislator to ensure these communities have a meaningful voice in decisions made at the State Capitol?
Fischer-Maki:
I’ve spent more than twenty-five years working on the issues that decide whether individuals and families here can hold it together, including healthcare, childcare, family stability, and substance use. So when I say state decisions land differently in Josephine County, I’m not making a political argument. I’ve watched it happen to real people.
For the last four years, my small business, Common Thread Consulting, has contracted with local governments, nonprofits, and state agencies including the Oregon Health Authority, the Department of Early Learning and Care, and Oregon’s System of Care. I have never worked in state government. I’ve spent my career working with it, from the outside, on behalf of communities like this one. That is the job I’m asking for.
Josephine County is not Portland, we don’t want to be, and never will be. Our local governments run on smaller tax bases and fewer staff. Our infrastructure needs, our economy, and our housing market don’t behave like metro areas.
Here’s what that means in real life. A kindergartner in this district can be standing at a bus stop before the sun comes up for an hour-long ride to school. A pediatric cancer diagnosis here can mean a forty-five-minute drive each way, over and over, to reach the right physician, which is only possible if you have reliable transportation. These and many other similar factors shape what’s possible for individuals and families, and they are not being represented on our behalf right now in Salem.
Take how Oregon pays for school buildings. The state’s matching program requires a district to pass a local construction bond before it can access state dollars, which means the districts with the oldest buildings and the weakest tax base are the least able to qualify for help. House Bill 3014 (2025) would have created a $100 million facility fund that asked about a district’s poverty rate, its property values, and its failed bond attempts instead of demanding a bond first. HB 3014 cleared its policy committee 5 to 1, with Republicans including Rep. Emily McIntire of Southern Oregon voting yes, but it died in Ways and Means without ever coming to a vote. If no one revives it before I get there, it will be one of the first bills I introduce.
Rural impact belongs in the conversation while a bill is being written, not discovered after it passes. I’ll push for smaller communities to get real technical help, someone who picks up the phone and walks city and county staff through an application, instead of grant programs only a metro-sized staff can win. And I’ll bring state agency leaders and legislators here, to stand in our communities and hear it from the people who live here.
I’ll also work with rural legislators regardless of party. Eastern Oregon, the coast, the Columbia River Gorge, and Southern Oregon disagree on plenty, but we share the same practical problems.
Grants Pass Tribune:
If the voters of House District 3 elect you in November and the Grants Pass Tribune interviews you again near the conclusion of your first term, what three measurable accomplishments would you hope to identify as evidence that you fulfilled the commitments you made to Josephine County during this campaign?
Fischer-Maki:
When you and I sit down two years from now, I want to be able to show you three things, through both data and constituent feedback.
First, an office this district trusts. By then we will have consistently answered the calls and emails that came in, and I’ll be able to tell you how many and how quickly. We will have held regular public conversations in Grants Pass, Williams, Cave Junction, and the Illinois Valley. I’ll report how many of those constituent service cases we took on and how many we resolved.
Second, relationships that make this district effective in Salem. Two years from now we will have brought our cities, our county, our school districts, our businesses and our nonprofits into the same room around a short list of shared priorities, and gone to Salem with unified asks. Josephine County should be known in that building as a place that shows up prepared.
Third, results you can feel, and a record of having given credit where credit is due. State dollars brought home, with the amounts and the partners in those efforts, will be clearly listed on my official representative website. Bills moved, including the school facilities bill I said I’d reintroduce, and I’ll tell you exactly how far it got and where it stopped. Where I only helped, I’ll say that. And where I tried and came up short, you’ll hear it from me before you hear it from anyone else.
One more thing about results in a biennium this tight: sometimes the win will be that something didn’t get cut. Protecting a program this district depends on is a real accomplishment, even though it never looks like one.
Now the honest part, because I’d rather say it in August than explain it later. Medicaid work requirements take effect in January 2027, the month I’d be sworn in. Something like 200,000 Oregonians are projected to lose health coverage. Federal decisions are moving costs onto the state and cutting state revenue at the same time. So this is not a session for promising new programs. It’s a session for protecting what works, ending what doesn’t, and being extremely good at making the case for this district.
Which is why the network matters more than the résumé. I won’t be going to Salem alone. So when I’m in a room arguing for House District 3, I’m bringing firsthand evidence instead of vague, outdated talking points.
More than anything, I want to help restore some respect. We have the ability to disagree while still treating people with dignity, and to rebuild the relationship between this community and its government. If, after two years, people who didn’t vote for me can say, “I may not agree with Susan on everything, but she showed up, listened, treated us with respect, and she worked hard for Josephine County,” that would be worth being proud of.
Maki’s responses place much of her campaign argument on constituent service, access to state decision-makers and the contention that Josephine County requires representation tailored to the economic, geographic and governmental realities of a rural district. Across the interview, she also identifies areas where she disagrees with past Oregon policy and makes clear that she considers representation of House District 3 a responsibility separate from allegiance to Democratic legislative leadership.
The interview also establishes specific benchmarks against which those campaign commitments could eventually be measured. Maki identifies responsiveness to constituents, stronger coordination among Josephine County institutions, state resources secured for the district and progress on legislation among the results she would expect voters and the Tribune to examine if she serves a first term.
For voters, the significance of a candidate interview rests not in agreement with every answer, but in having a detailed record of what a person seeking public office said before Election Day. Maki’s complete responses provide House District 3 voters with that record as they consider who they want representing Josephine County when the next Oregon Legislature convenes.