Two compete to be Springfield’s next representative in the Oregon House

Springfield needs a new state representative, and voters have two choices on the November ballot. 

The winner will succeed John Lively to represent the 7th District in the Oregon House of Representatives, which includes Springfield. Lively, a Democrat, is not seeking reelection after 14 years in the Legislature.

Voters will choose between two candidates: 

• Democrat Kori Rodley is a Springfield city councilor who works at Lane County Developmental Disabilities Services.
• Republican Adam Wilson is a financial adviser and wealth manager at LPL Financial.

Representatives serve two-year terms, and there are no term limits. Oregon legislators receive an annual salary of $43,440.

Kori Rodley

Rodley said the primary election in May reinforced how well she knows the district. 

“I just know Springfield and understand Springfield, and it was such a great opportunity to get out and talk to people,” she said. 

She said residents have a strong local identity and are proud of the city. 

“I think of us as this working-class, kind of roll-up-your-sleeves, pragmatic town, and I just felt like that has been reinforced the more and more we talk to people, even though we’re a city in transition, and people are so proud of the work that we’ve done in downtown and the street bond repairs that we’ve done, and some of the new businesses are coming in,” Rodley said.

She grew up in a “solidly working-class family” in Roseburg. After high school, Rodley moved to Portland, where she started working in human services. She attended Lane Community College and the University of Oregon and now works in planning and administration at Lane County Developmental Disabilities Services. 

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

Rodley was elected to the Springfield City Council in 2020 and reelected in 2024. She has chaired the city’s Legislative Committee and touts a practical and deep understanding of how government works through her experience at the county and city levels.

Rodley said that while voters were not talking about data centers during the primary, they have become a growing topic of discussion.

“Most people have said either I’m opposed to them or I’m trying to figure out what’s going on,” she said. “I’m like, ‘I’m also trying to figure out what’s going on. Let’s do that together.’”

Rodley would support a statewide moratorium on new data centers to assess impacts. She also said she doesn’t believe taxpayers should subsidize big corporations and emphasized transparency. 

“None of this should be happening in these backdoor deals or nondisclosure agreements that people don’t know about,” she said.

She said the 2027 legislative session will focus on the state budget.

“I think that it’s going to be a really rough year,” she said. “I think that even though we may not see all of the impacts from what’s happened at the federal government until after 2027, there’s going to be plans around that and looking at what’s happening with Medicaid and what’s happening in the insurance industry and the medical industry.”

She said that involves setting statewide priorities and deciding what to put on hold. 

Rodley wants to see low-cost childcare for infants to pre-K located in public schools, something she said could tie families and communities to their public schools sooner and make it easier for people who have kids of different ages to take them to the same building.

“It also, I hope, would help to professionalize the workforce because you’ve got childcare workers working alongside of teachers and other folks who are staff, and I would love to see that help to elevate how much those folks are being paid and their access to benefits because you’ve got them all in the same building,” she said. 

Rodley said a passion of hers on City Council has been to figure out how the city can be more useful in helping develop housing and she has learned what the state has done that is helpful and what makes it harder for the city. 

“So I’m hoping to get up there and sort of block and tackle on some of those regulations that make it hard and learn more,” she said. 

Rodley said she is happy to see that Oregon’s federal lawmakers are introducing legislation to ban the corporate practice of medicine. She said work done at the state level needs to be strengthened.

“It’s been such a big deal here in Springfield and throughout the state,” she said. “So I’d also love to dig in and work on that.”

Rodley had raised $278,634 this year in cash contributions and in-kind donations and had spent $235,650 as of Tuesday, Oct. 13.

Adam Wilson

Adam Wilson is self-imposing term limits on his candidacy. 

“I think the whole concept that we have allowed these career politicians to make a career of it makes them very vulnerable to doing the will of the political establishment,” he told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “I will not be a politician four years from now. That is a definitive statement that I can make, and I see myself being a thorn in the side to the entire political establishment in the system.”

Wilson was born and raised in Florence and moved to the Eugene-Springfield area in 2000 and graduated from Bushnell University, with a bachelor’s degree in business management.

He described himself as a “very blue-collar rooted guy” and said he worked in construction during college to pay his bills. He had jobs in banking before moving into investment advising. Wilson is an independent broker with LPL Financial in Eugene, where he does financial planning and wealth management for clients. He is married to Francesa Wilson and has four children.

Wilson said what motivated him to get into politics was “watching years and years of fiscal mismanagement at the state level.” 

“I have a great view into the older generation and the financial security they have, and what allowed them to get that financial security,” he said. “And I would like to be able to take that knowledge and try to push policy in a way that would allow that same type of financial security for the younger generations that are coming up and entering the workforce.”

Wilson thinks Springfield is a “very blue-collar working-class town” and he doesn’t believe that the current political establishment in Oregon reflects the values of Springfield. 

He said running for the seat “felt like it was a good opportunity to really try to steer the state in the right direction through Springfield and bring investment back into Springfield and to represent the values of Springfield on a state level.”

In knocking on doors and talking with voters, Wilson said he’s hearing there’s “frustration with the current path.”

“Many, many people are getting to that point where they’re ready for a change in our state and they’re willing to vote that way,” he said. 

Wilson said that if the Democrats’ supermajority in the Legislature is broken, it would give Republicans some leverage when negotiating legislation. 

“It forces the current power structure in Salem to at least listen to us when it comes to fiscal matters,” he said. 

The Oregon constitution requires a three-fifths vote of each chamber to pass new taxes or raise existing ones. Democrats currently have a three-fifths supermajority in the House and the Senate. 

He said Oregon needs to reduce regulations and the cost of permitting and fees when it comes to building housing. 

“The entry from renter to homeownership has to be every politician’s main goal in our community right now in Oregon,” Wilson said, noting homeownership is a big part of having buy-in into a community and feeling financially secure.

He would like to see a policy that waives the Oregon capital gains tax if someone sells their property to a first-time homebuyer who is an Oregon resident with an Federal Housing Administration loan. 

If elected, Wilson would present legislation to overturn House Bill 3115, which requires city and county laws that regulate sitting, lying, sleeping or keeping warm and dry outdoors on public property be “objectively reasonable.” He said that repeal would free up local municipalities “to be able to police their own environments without the overburdening of the state regulatory environment.”

He would also like to see proposed legislation “that would criminalize vagrancy and open air drug use to the point of mandatory jail or treatment for repeat offenders, and just basically take a fairly hardline no-tolerance policy on that.”

Wilson said he would also work on “the proper use of our natural forests and our public lands.”

“What we’ve done is we’ve mismanaged our forest in such a way that our greatest asset has become a massive liability,” he said. “And I mean, instead of receiving timber revenue from correct forest management, we are now paying money to put out fires that are destroying our timberland.”

Wilson said data centers have been a unifying issue among people he’s talked with in the community, Republicans and Democrats. 

“Whether your personal beliefs are we need a data center for the tax revenue or not, I think it’s really important. This is one of these cases we talk about where it’s like, we need to listen to the voters and listen to the people and they are against them, and we need to be responsive to that,” he said.

Wilson had raised $69,259 this year in cash contributions, loans and in-kind donations and had spent $60,094, as of Tuesday, Oct. 13.

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