Three Democrats vie for Springfield legislative seat of retiring John Lively  

Three candidates are competing in the May 19 primary election to secure the Democratic spot in the November election for the Oregon House of Representatives 7th district, which encompasses Springfield.

In Oregon, only a voter affiliated with the party may vote in a party’s primary. 

The Democratic candidate who receives the most votes will proceed to the general election in November to run against Republican candidate Adam Wilson, a wealth advisor at LPL Financial, who is unopposed in the primary.

Democrats who live in the district will see three candidates on the May primary ballot:

• Ky Fireside, a progressive activist and archaeologist with the civil engineering firm Kleinfelder
• KC Huffman, an attorney at Bromley Newton Huffman in Eugene, and also a high school baseball coach
• Kori Rodley, a Springfield city councilor who works at Lane County Developmental Disabilities Services

The winner in November will succeed Rep. John Lively, a Democrat, who is not seeking reelection after 14 years in the Legislature. Representatives serve two-year terms, and there are no term limits.

Lively, a former Springfield mayor, was elected in 2012 to represent District 12, which at the time covered Springfield. He was reelected four times. After the district’s boundaries were redrawn in 2022, Lively won the District 7 seat. He was reelected in 2024.

District 7 covers Springfield and surrounding areas to the north and south. In the 2022 general election, Lively beat Republican Alan Stout, a current Springfield city councilor, 52% to 48%. In November 2024, Lively beat Republican Cory Burket, 56% to 44%.

“I think the primary is for people getting out, stating their positions and trying to convince people whether they’re the best candidate,” said Lively, who has made a campaign donation to Fireside and Rodley. “I’m not so sure that my endorsing or not endorsing would make a big difference. It might, but I respect the voters enough to let them make the choice.”

Ky Fireside

Ky Fireside doesn’t like not knowing things. 

The archaeologist, Springfield resident and candidate for Oregon House District 7 is pursuing their second bachelor’s degree, this time in cybersecurity. (Fireside uses they/them pronouns.)

Fireside is an organizer with Eyes Off Eugene. The group last year lobbied for the removal of Flock Safety automated license-plate reader cameras in Eugene and Springfield, citing concerns about privacy and data being shared with the federal government. 

They were part of a Senate Judiciary work group that worked on a bill during the 2026 state legislative session regulating law enforcement use of license-plate reader technology. Fireside called Senate Bill 1516A, which cleared both chambers, “the first little attempt at putting some safeguards” on the technology.

Now, Fireside seeks to become a state legislator. 

Fireside spent their first 25 years in Chicago before moving to California, where they worked as a 911 dispatcher. They moved to the Eugene-Springfield area in 2020 to attend the University of Oregon and earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with an archaeology specialty in 2021.

While in school, they worked at Starbucks, and in 2022, led the first unionization campaign of a Starbucks in Oregon.

“Getting everybody together to work towards a common goal was super important there, and I think that’ll be important in the Legislature,” Fireside said. 

They experienced that process with SB1516A.

“I was up in the Capitol almost every day this short session, talking to legislators, explaining, here’s what this is, here’s what the problem is, here’s why this will help,” Fireside said. “So just getting people all on the same page is so valuable.”

Since 2022, Fireside has worked as an archaeologist for civil engineering firm Kleinfelder. The firm is contracted by companies or state agencies to monitor cultural sites during construction or after wildfires. 

“When I found out that (Lively) was retiring, I kind of figured the best way to continue some of the work that we were doing would be to just step into that role myself,” Fireside said, noting they live outside the city incorporated boundary, which precludes them from serving on City Council or running for mayor.

Fireside said they’re an independent thinker who is “not afraid to be the person that dives in and tries to solve a problem.” They’ll be a leader in the Legislature, they said, at a time when Salem needs strong leaders and more diversity of subject matter experts.

“There’s nobody there that understands tech, and we’re at a point where tech is a major part of everyday life,” they said. “AI is becoming part of everything. Computers are part of everything. And when most people there have a background as a prosecutor, they simply don’t understand the issue.”

Fireside said District 7 is in crisis mode when it comes to health care, mentioning the closure of Eugene’s University District hospital, “so anybody in Eugene that needs hospital care is coming to Springfield,” and PeaceHealth pursuing an out-of-state emergency room provider for its RiverBend hospital.

“Health care is getting less affordable and less accessible, and it’s going to become a complete disaster,” they said.

Fireside supports health care for all in Oregon. In 2023, the Oregon Legislature convened the Universal Health Plan Governance Board to design a publicly funded health care system for Oregon. The board will present a comprehensive plan to the Legislature by September this year.

“We have a real chance to actually pass that, and I don’t know how else we get out of the mess that we’re in health care-wise,” Fireside said.

They said they would like to see more effort from the Legislature regarding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They think Oregon needs to revisit what its sanctuary law means and what counts as assisting immigration.

Fireside said they want Oregon to have a stronger system of protections for workers, including allowing more people to unionize and assessing bigger fines for union busting and wage theft.

They said health care and education need to be funded before money is put toward other matters. 

“Besides fixing the tax structure, I think it’s just going to be a matter of reallocating,” they said. 

“We are not collecting enough, and then we are spending it in weird places,” said Fireside, who mentioned the Treasure Valley Reload Center in eastern Oregon that the Legislature has been funding since 2017 but has not been built. “And I think if we fix both of those, there probably is enough money for things like school and health care and nice roadways without taxing people just for driving.”

KC Huffman

“How do we help people?”

That question is always on KC Huffman’s mind. The first time he donated blood, he learned how big the demand was, so he joined the board of directors for Lane Memorial Blood Bank.

“I try not to lose that sort of young wide-eyed view of: ‘You can still change the world’ — and for those people (who received blood), you did,” Huffman told Lookout Eugene-Springfield.

“Service to people has been important to me throughout my life.” 

He has also served on the boards of Alvord-Taylor, a nonprofit serving people with disabilities, and Oregon Community Credit Union. He said he would bring a collaborative approach to the Legislature.

Huffman grew up on the coast in Reedsport, where his father worked in a sawmill. He attended Linfield College in McMinnville and studied finance and political science before moving in 1997 to attend law school at the University of Oregon, where he earned his degree in 2000. He has lived in Springfield since 2003.

Today, he is an attorney at Bromley Newton Huffman in Eugene, where he practices business, real estate, estate planning, probate and trust administration law. Huffman previously worked at Thorp Purdy Jewett Urness & Wilkinson law firm in Springfield.

He and his wife, Tristyne, have four kids, aged 21, 18, 16 and 13. He coaches baseball at Marist High School, where his 16-year-old son attends and where his older kids graduated. 

“The schools in Springfield are struggling,” he said. “I’ve talked to families who have transferred out of the district because of concerns that they’ve seen. What I don’t necessarily know is all the reasons why. For some people, it just wasn’t a good fit. For some people, the opportunities to take certain classes weren’t there.”

Huffman sees an uneven sense of community around schools compared to other parts of Springfield.

“Finding ways to best use resources is critical in my opinion,” Huffman said. “Are we currently using the available dollars in the best way possible?”

Huffman said Springfield is on a positive path for economic expansion, touting development in the Gateway area, but it should continue work to attract more businesses.

“Eugene creates a lot of red tape at times on how you can start new things,” he said. “And I think Springfield has done a good job of positioning themselves as the neighbor saying, ‘Hey, come check out Springfield.’”

He is interested in how private investment can supplement taxes when it comes to revenue, and pointed toward how development of hotels in the Gateway area has drawn in additional businesses and restaurants. He wants to know if that template could be applied to other places in Springfield.

While he sees the benefits of economic development, Huffman said lawmakers may need to prioritize fixing gaps in health care before bringing more businesses to the area, “because we’re already not providing enough services to everyone, or really access to everyone, and the cost can be prohibitive.”

He said the state needs to figure out what to prioritize with limited resources.

“And that’s going to take looking at across the board, where do we want to improve?,” Huffman said. “And if we decide, for example, that health care, business development and schools, of those three, what order do we have to go in to make it make sense? I think health care has to be towards the top.”

Huffman said that when it comes to ICE activity, Oregon should decide for itself when it needs federal help. He said if the Legislature disagrees with what ICE is doing, “I think we do have an obligation to say, ‘No, we don’t need your help,’ or ‘No, we aren’t going to help assist you with this.’”

He believes agreed-upon solutions tend to work better than directives handed down and would work to be collaborative whenever possible.

“We have parties so we can have these arguments and these ideas,” he said. “And where I think we’ve gone astray is we’ve had the arguments and we’ve stopped looking for the learning moments in them. We’ve just decided I want to argue so I can be right, as opposed to I want to argue so I can learn.”

It’s also where Huffman feels his work as an attorney sets him up to be in Salem. As an attorney, he gathers information from his client and the opposing attorney to understand different perspectives of an issue and seek common ground.

“That will lend itself to the type of work that’s done at the Legislature,” Huffman said. 

Kori Rodley

Kori Rodley likened complex housing projects to complicated recipes, such as baking baguettes.

Rodley, who called herself a “therapeutic baker,” said it takes time to see the results, which she has experienced firsthand as a Springfield city councilor.

“I’ve learned all of these ways that you can piece this stuff together in order to get it over the finish line for affordable housing,” Rodley told Lookout. 

After Rodley joined Springfield City Council in 2021, she advocated for using American Rescue Plan Act funds to purchase undeveloped properties that could later be leveraged for housing projects. Earlier this year, the council voted to transfer a Main Street property it bought in 2024 to Cornerstone Community Housing, which plans to develop three apartment buildings.

Now, Rodley wants to take what she’s learned on City Council and advocate for Springfield as a state representative.

Rodley grew up in a “solidly working-class family” in Roseburg. Her father was a logger and her mother still works as an office manager.

After high school, Rodley moved to Portland, where she read in a newspaper about a recovery house for women with kids who were leaving prison. She started volunteering and took a grant-writing class to learn how to raise money for the program.

“I’m very much a systems and process person, and the systems were built to work the way they work,” Rodley said. “And working in human services, you get to get in these systems and try to change and fix and stretch them so that they could better serve people the way they need to.”

She attended Lane Community College and the University of Oregon.

“I went on all sorts of adventures, and I got married, and I had kids, and I came out,” Rodley said.

Today, the Springfield resident works in planning and administration at Lane County Developmental Disabilities Services, where she enjoys working behind the scenes in social services. She has worked at United Way of Lane County and Junction City Local Aid. 

“It’s always been important for me to be connected to work that is impacting people’s lives in a positive way,” Rodley said. 

She and her spouse, Teri, have four adult children and two grandchildren.

On council, Rodley has chaired the city’s Legislative Committee to advocate for Springfield. She touts a practical and deep understanding of how government works through her experience at the county and city levels.

“For me, this is very much a ‘for the love of Springfield’ effort,” she said. “I think that my understanding of the people who live in Springfield, the interests, the processes, the aesthetic of Springfield is something that I will take with me (to the Legislature).”

Rodley said she has also learned how to have hard conversations and “do hard work” with people with different opinions.

“I’ve worked in these situations for so long that I think I have a lot of skills around, ‘How do we get to what we agree on?’” she said.

She sees affordability as one of the biggest issues in Oregon right now. One of the lenses Rodley said she would bring to the Legislature is making sure working people are not left behind when it comes to cost-cutting. 

“If we’re going to make cuts, let’s make it over here and not on the backs of working people, because we often try to balance our budgets and make our cuts at the bottom, as opposed to looking at the top or looking at all of these other areas where we’ve inflated,” she said. 

Rodley said that Measures 5 and 50, which limit property taxes in Oregon, need structural changes in order for cities and the state to raise needed revenue, but those changes will require less polarized, cross-party conversations.

“We all talk about it, and we never sit down and figure out how to tackle the repercussions of Measures 5 and 50,” she said. 

Rodley has been critical of PeaceHealth’s announcement to end its contract with Eugene Emergency Physicians, a local group that has provided emergency care at the hospital for nearly 35 years, in favor of Georgia-based company ApolloMD. Rodley, who supports health care for all, said the health care system is broken.

“We’re going to have to sit down and figure out how to fix it,” she said. “And we might not be able to fix it for the nation, but Oregon’s been pretty good about figuring out, ‘How do we do things within our state.’”

Rodley supports legislation passed in Oregon this year to rein in activity by ICE officers.

“We should be able to hold the immigration officers to the same standards that we hold our public safety officers to,” she said.