RL Garrigus Interviews Michael Sipe

Tune in to hear RL Garrigus interview Michael Sipe, Republican Candidate for State Representative in House District 53.

"I'm definitely not a career politician and I'm not a lawyer. I'm a business guy. With billions of dollars of your tax dollars on the line, we need more business people and fewer politicians and lawyers in Salem. Being self-employed for nearly all my life (since 4th grade, actually), I've pretty much relied on results as a resume."

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Here we are this morning with Michael SIPE the Republican candidate for district 53. And, again, thank you for being here.

Michael Sipe  0:08  
RL, thanks. It's really great to be here. It's, it's pretty cool to be on this end of it. I'm usually on the other end of the sound waves coming out. And so it's just really fun to be here. Good,

Unknown Speaker  0:19  
good. Well, let's just start right there. And so why did you decide that you wanted to stick your toe in the water?

Michael Sipe  0:29  
Well, I'm a business guy, and not a politician or, and certainly not a career politician, or, or a lawyer. There's plenty of those in in Salem, I think everybody would probably agree with that. But I never had an interest in politics at all. In fact, I voted. But I didn't actually even really care who won that much. It's I'm sort of embarrassed now to say that, but But I expected that our Constitution would be a guardrail, regardless of who won. And then he may remember an event that happened until early 2020. And in when we discovered that, that the executive branch could actually completely disregard the state law and the Constitution. And where that hit hard for me was in a couple of areas, one when the churches were closed down, and which is unconstitutional, unfortunately, Supreme Court agreed with that, when the schools were closed down, which was a travesty, and and a tragedy for us all that we have only begun to see the devastation as a consequence of that extended closings. And then my friends in business were their businesses were shut down by the government. I mean, who would have ever thought that would happen? So that caused me to start paying attention to politics, because I had friends all across the community that were were shuttered and couldn't operate and devastation that appeared to be coming out of that was really troubling. Fast forward to November of last year 2021, tax Zika called and said, Hey, I'm the district has been redrawn, and I'm going to retire and would you run, and so after some prayer, and thought, my wife, Kathy, and I decided, hey, look, we can just, we're not going to leave, we love this place. So we're not going to run, we got to stand and fight, and we can't just whine about it, we need to go to work. And so we decided we would, would accept and, and run for office and with the purpose of providing solutions of helping

Unknown Speaker  2:31  
some of the things important to you, as as you are on this path. Give us an idea of what they may be.

Michael Sipe  2:40  
Sure. One obvious as a business guy I'm planning to go to Salem as a business advocate, and specifically a small business advocate is my clients are, are all Central Oregon. Companies, just regular folks trying to make a living, trying to do good work, job creators value producers. And so that's why I'm endorsed by the Oregon Chamber of Commerce by the National Federation of Independent Business by the Oregon Small Business Association by the taxpayers association by all of the agricultural interests, including Deschutes farm, rural Oregon Farm Bureau, and so to go to Salem to actually advocate for small business is critical if you may have heard that Oregon is not very friendly to business. And we need to fix that because small business is the backbone of our community. It's what funds the charities and what's funds the churches it hires the people that it supports everything businesses, the only thing that makes money, everything else spends money. So that's one second thing is public safety. Our government, specifically in Oregon has forgotten what the first duty of government is, and that's public safety. If you think about when Ben was settled, I'm real sure that the first person they hired was not a social worker. They hired a sheriff. Right because law and order public safety, the protection of our society from from bad actors inside and bad actors outside of community is the first job of government and Oregon abandoned that over the last three years with all this stupid defund the police thing. I mean, what a what a tragic move that was. And so I'm very pro law enforcement, public safety. That's why I'm endorsed by the Oregon sheriffs by the Oregon police chiefs by the Oregon State Police by the victims rights organizations. And so going to Salem to be a defender of the police. Not a defender of the police is a big deal to me. Third thing is budget priorities. If you look at the summary of the Oregon budget, I don't mean the budget itself, just the height what they call the high points. Yeah, it's two inches thick. Two inches thick, the high points, and it's $121 billion. That's up 160% From today As in 19, there is enormous amount of waste. But more than that, there's, there's terrible mis prioritization. Everyone knows what the main problems are. But the budget is not being directed toward those. And it takes a business guy to go in there and say, Wait a minute, what we're supposed to be doing is this, what you're doing is this, we need to we need to change our priorities, we definitely need to change a direction.

Unknown Speaker  5:23  
I know, also, one of the one of the tenants that you're you're hoping to deal with, has to do with the homeless. And, and which has, I mean, we all see it. I mean, you know, just head head down coolin Hummel and and it's, it doesn't look like it's getting any better. But you know, there's a lot of different people that are trying to solve that problem.

Michael Sipe  5:50  
Right, that's a really a critical thing I never expected when I got started on this thing, because of the other things that I was, as a priority, I never expected to be putting nearly amount the amount of attention as I am into this. And so there's there's two levels of this that need to get addressed. At the state level, one of the things that has to happen is a repeal of measure 110, this has been an absolute debacle. And this state did it the voters were sold a bill of goods, and then the state has miserably failed to execute on it and the consequences. Tons of people are on the street right now that are addicted, mentally ill dying. And a lot of it stems from this failure of measure 110 I was one of the first maybe the first political candidate early this year to start calling out that now it's become, you know, like, well, actually not on the on the opposing party side, my my opponent actually is still defending it saying now it's too it's too early to tell, let's just keep going maybe we can tinker with it. No, it is a mess. And and we need to repeal it and and rethink this whole deal. Especially in terms of, of mandatory referral. You can't just expect people to just change voluntarily. And I have personal experience with that. Because you know, my wife for 30 years before her tragic death was severely bipolar and alcoholic, and we went through all the whole treatment thing and in and out of facilities and everything else. And, and so it's just a it's a, you just can't assume that people are just going to do it. So we got to get measure 110 Done. And other thing at the state level is we needed to go heavily after the the pushers of drugs. Yeah. So we're not ever going to stop the flow of these drugs into Oregon. But by gosh, it shouldn't be a flood, there shouldn't be a tsunami, we need to go after them, then that goes back to my lawn order. position. And so at the state level, those are the two big things we need to take take care of. And then the in regard to measure 110, or whatever it is, if we're going to take marijuana dollars, and use them to provide treatment facilities, for heaven's sakes, we can't sit on this stuff for a couple of years and allow hundreds of millions of dollars to amass while people die in the streets. Now it's it's finally been distributed through this massive Oaj bureaucracy that bled it dry and delayed everything. But it's a tragic mess that the bureaucracy of the state has caused.

Unknown Speaker  8:20  
Yeah, one of the things that you would have the opportunity to affect, hopefully, at the state level, I think about Senate Bill 762, the wildfire risk maps, the rules that are getting written along with that. How, you know, wildfire is an issue. Yes. Will that put put an undue burden on homeowners, depending on how how the rules are used? Possibly. So you no doubt along with doing something about the forest doing what you can there to get the feds to come in and clean up their act as well in the forest? I mean, that would be a real role that you could affect.

Michael Sipe  9:14  
Absolutely. And it's a real thorny mess again, unfortunately, you're probably going to hear me beat up on the bureaucracy of the state a whole lot. Well, what an insane, foolish thing that was that that initial issuance of this wildfire map, you know, if you like there's no wildfire possibility out in the middle of alfalfa field under a wheel line, then, but yet there, that was part of it. So it causes me to have some great skepticism about the ability of the bureaucracy of the state to actually get anything done. If you look at the failure of measure 110 If you look at the failure, the rent relief, you look at the failure, that unemployment, on and on and on the bureaucracy the state is really not showing its best colors right now. Clearly defensible space makes sense. But that's always made sense. I mean, people should protect their own property, they should clean up around that. That's that just makes sense as being a good citizen for a number of reasons. The whole mandate of it by a state bureaucracy to me feels like another one of those executive branch overreaches the forest big day, we've got to clean up the mess on the ground. I mean, if you've been out in the, in the woods, I'm out I live out in the woods most of the time, probably some, some part of the year, you probably call me homeless, because I'm out sleeping under a tree and, and out kicking around and fishing and everything else. But but the we got to clear the underbrush out where we can in the state stuff, we have to get that cleaned up, we need to have responsible harvesting. And then the issue about getting after the fires immediately when they start and not just allowing the whole place to burn down is I think, pretty critical. We are challenged by the fact that the state government, state governments only are as affected only small part of the force. And the feds have the vast majority of them. But but we're supposed to have a couple of advocates in in Washington, that aren't really coming through either.

Unknown Speaker  11:10  
Put well. So here we are. If there was one thing that you want everybody out there to know about Michael SIPE load, what would it be?

Michael Sipe  11:22  
I'm just a regular guy, you know it. And that'll probably come through and the way people hear Me, Me Talk, I, I don't have political ambitions beyond going to Salem here. I never had political ambitions, I just want to solve some problems. And that's what I've done. My whole career as, as a business guy. And if you think about business, the only reason business exists is because there's a problem. And somebody goes after solving it, and figures out a way to do it at a profit so they can keep doing it. And that's what I've been doing my whole business career. That's what I coach businesses on how to do. And that's what I want to do in Salem is take that kind of, of just common sense, I grew up on a farm, you know, I'm just just a regular guy. But I'm a regular guy with common sense and a lot of years of business experience that I want to take to Salem to go after some problems that, frankly, if you if you took any one of the problems that are plaguing us, which by the way, didn't fall down from the sky, they didn't come from Mars, they're the result of bad policy from an out of balance government that has been dominated by one party for years, a long time, but certainly for the last decade. That's where they came from bad leadership, bad policy. But if I brought any one of these problems to you, or to any other business savvy person in Central Oregon, in about a half an hour, literally not longer than that, you can look at the problem. And you can go, Well, this is clearly not working what we're doing. And if we did this, we could fix it. It doesn't take very long to see where the failures of the policy and the decision makers have come. And it also doesn't take very long for someone with common sense to say, Well, why don't we just do this? And and we could do that all across the board, if we have the will, and if we have enough balance to be able to have that debate.

Unknown Speaker  13:16  
Excellent. Michael, thank you ever so much. I appreciate your time.

Michael Sipe  13:20  
Absolutely. Thanks, RL. And thanks for that being the voice of the community for so long. I love it. And also appreciate you being willing to help with the Duck Race recently and also being willing to to help with the Ben Christmas Parade, which I produced that's coming up in just a few weeks.

Narrator  13:37  
Fun stuff. Awesome. Thanks. All right. Thank you appreciate it. Thanks for listening to cascade views with Michael SIPE. To find out more about Mike the upcoming election. The key issues he's focused on in his campaign to represent Central Oregon and Salem as a state representative. Visit www dot a voice for Central oregon.com that's www dot voice for Central oregon.com. You can get your own copy of Michael SIPE best selling book the Avada principle@amazon.com. And finally, please vote in the upcoming election. Your Voice Matters