Six candidates vie for three open Oakridge City Council seats

Six candidates, including two incumbents, are in the running for three seats on the Oakridge City Council in the November election. 

Oakridge elects its councilors at large.

Two incumbents, Dirk “Poncho” Tarman and Thaddeus Carter, will run against four newcomers, Bee Havior, Goat Crudup, Kim Fresenberg and Jeffrey Crosby.

Emergency services were a common priority for the candidates, but much more is on the docket for each individual candidate.

Dirk ‘Poncho’ Tarman

Tarman, who has served on the Oakridge City Council since 2025, grew up in Oakridge before moving away for carpentry work.  

“I graduated in 1994, and the mills closed down shortly before that, so there were essentially no jobs in Oakridge and nothing to do,” Tarman said.

After being part of the carpenters union for about eight years, he began classes at Lane Community College, got his engineering transfer degree, and transferred to Portland State University, where he got a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. 

He’s worked in mechanical engineering for almost 20 years now. 

He moved back to Oakridge about five years ago. He said he had stayed in the loop about what was happening in town because of friends and family who had stayed.

“I’ve been to a lot of other small towns like Oakridge that were logging towns that fell on hard times when the mills shut down,” Tarman said. “But they found a way to turn that around. They were prospering, and I go to these towns, and I’m like, ‘That’s amazing! Why can’t Oakridge figure this out?’”

The main reason he’s running for reelection is to address problems that Highway 58 creates for Oakridge.

He said that the main waterway, water supply line, main sewer supply line, and the stormwater system all run underneath the highway, which runs directly through the town. 

His logic is that the city could improve the transportation infrastructure and waterworks infrastructure at the same time. 

“To access that and redo it, we got to tear the highway up. And so, I’m like, ‘What a better meshing of things?’” Tarman said. “Let’s work with ODOT (the Oregon Department of Transportation). Come up with the funds, make a long-term plan for how to get all this done, get all the funding in place to redo it, the grants, etc., and do it all together.”

He also said it might be smart to work with Lane Electric to bury the electric lines underneath the highway to be more resilient during fire season.

When asked about what steps the council is currently taking, Tarman said councilors have met with ODOT and the Department of Land Conservation and Development to better understand their long-term plan involving Oakridge and Highway 58.

Thaddeus Carter

Like Tarman, Carter also grew up in Oakridge before leaving around 2000 and returning seven years ago.

He works for the local nonprofit South Willamette Solutions. There, he helps run the Oakridge Air Program. 

The program uses grant funding to improve homes, including replacing wood stoves to help address air quality. He also works on an Oregon Health Authority grant for home improvements for low-income residents.

He’s seeking reelection to continue the work he believes he’s accomplished during his first term. 

“I really believe in, you know, what the mayor’s goals and a lot of my fellow council members’ goals are,” he said. “For me, [it’s] to be able to continue that work and kind of see it through.”

He also served on the Rural Tourism Program for Lane County, where lodging-tax revenue is distributed to local communities for tourism-related improvements and events. Carter said he wants to continue connecting the program’s work with the council.

His priorities include responsible spending and infrastructure improvements to help Oakridge attract businesses. 

“We need those infrastructure things in place, so that when we do have opportunities that come along … they’re able to be like, ‘OK, we can do that,’” he said.

He also wants to represent residents in discussions about forest fuels reduction and ODOT’s proposed highway refurbishment. For a tight city budget, he would prioritize maintaining ambulance and fire services without further burdening residents, as well as infrastructure, police support and wildfire preparedness — especially for low-income residents.

Thaddeus said his roots in Oakridge and connections through his nonprofit work, schools, youth sports and community organizations help him consider issues from different perspectives. His approach to spending, he said, is to weigh needs and determine what benefits the community most.

Goat Crudup

Crudup is a disabled Army veteran who served as a Ranger medic and has lived in Oakridge for four years.

“A couple years back, everybody was saying if you want to be, if you want to see a change, be that change. So I wanted the community to grow,” Crudup said.

He’s originally from the East Coast, and said that many of the places he’s lived in have been “tourist states.” He wants to help Oakridge attract more tourism due to its natural beauty.

He also said that the community seems to have issues with Oakridge’s general infrastructure, himself included. 

As far as priorities, he hopes to help improve water, sewage, sidewalks and to coordinate with ODOT regarding Highway 58 construction. 

He also mentioned the Willamette Activity Center, which he hopes to help reopen for the disenfranchised community.

“I have a 13-year-old, so the kids are always on the line, being a parent and all that,” Crudup said. 

He said he thinks a main issue that Oakridge is facing is a “lack of development.” 

“It’s causing the economy out here to die. So trying to inspire small businesses to start up out here would be kind of a priority of mine,” Crudup said. 

“In my opinion, we need to invest in a little bit of the base infrastructure, so parking lots, power poles, and stuff like that, and then allow the businesses to build their structures,” Crudup said. “Maybe offer some tax incentives if they bring enough jobs to the community and can employ more people in town.”

He also said he’d fight hard to preserve ambulance and emergency services from budget cutbacks. 

“We need to be safe and a beautiful place,” Crudup said. “People need to come see, and I feel like it would make a world of difference.”

Crudup described himself as a working-class citizen who takes a younger perspective on things and is always open to listening. 

“I’m here for the issues, not for a party,” Crudup said. 

Bee Havior

Havior moved to Oakridge during the pandemic in 2020 from Houston. 

Havior said, “I co-founded the first makerspace in Houston when I was a teenager; that’s sort of a community workshop.”

Havior previously worked at a local electronics factory and offers electronics repair around the city. 

Havior said they have experience with meeting facilitation, proceedings and conflict resolution.

“That makerspace that I really just had my early adulthood in was a nonprofit, and it had a lot of interesting individuals in pretty regular member meetings,” Havior said. “And getting through those in a timely and productive manner was something I got pretty good at.”

In Oakridge, Havior looks to do the same thing. 

“I saw right when I moved here that the council was not approving the city’s budget,” Havior said. “It was partially due to our very controversial emergency medical services funding, and the budget committee brought something forth and they essentially just said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’m going to take it to Facebook and see what they think,’ and that rightfully pissed me off.”

Havior looks to promote tourism, especially astro-tourism (for stargazers), if elected to the council. 

“As far out as we are, this could be a destination for astro-tourism, and that’s something that actually peaks in the winter,” Havior said. “A lot of the businesses here are dependent on people coming through, and they just don’t make any money in the off season.”

Havior proposed adding shades to streetlights and after-hours lighting guidelines to reduce light pollution and make Oakridge more attractive for stargazers.

Additionally, the unique festivals that Oakridge offers are something that Havior would push for attracting tourism.

Havior brought up pedestrian infrastructure.

“I’ve been walking a lot more in preparation for the election and just taking notes of where the sidewalks are completely occluded by Himalayan blackberry, or where it ends abruptly, or has a level change,” Havior said. “Having a monthly art walk makes it pretty obvious when there are places that people would trip.”

They also said they would support efforts to turn the Willamette Activity Center into an urban resiliency center, with emergency power, filtered air, food resources and medical services.

Finally, Havior said they would prioritize EMS funding, citing the town’s large elderly population and the need for quick response times. They also said they did not want their work on the council to create an additional financial burden for residents.

Kim Fresenburg

Fresenburg is a budget analyst for the Oregon Health Authority, and previously worked as a consultant at numerous startups.

Fresenburg said that her time as a homeowners association treasurer in Colorado is what led her to find more public service jobs.

She said that a main priority if elected is budget planning, citing a lack of planning in the past. She hoped to bring that to the council and start planning for three to five years ahead.

“I think another thing that we need to work on is just like building trust in the City Council and city employees because it seems like, just looking at some of the comments on Facebook, there has been a loss of trust in the leaders of the city,” Fresenburg said. 

She pointed to low attendance at town halls, including when the council has gone over things like the ambulance levy. With a larger turnout, she hopes the council can hear from more citizens and accommodate the greater public.

“There are a lot of good people out there, and I’m sure they have a lot of good ideas on ways that we could do to help make the city better,” Fresenburg said.

To accomplish this, she said she’d encourage an update of the city website to make information easier to access. Another goal would be to increase transparency.

“I think if we do make more of an effort to be more transparent and report for each of the departments (on) what’s going on, what they can improve, and addressing the concerns of the citizens,” Fresenburg said, “I think if we start taking actions like that word will start to get around, and hopefully that’ll start to bring more people in.”

Jeffrey Crosby

Crosby is an Army veteran and a real estate agent who moved to Oakridge two years ago.

Crosby wants to help preserve Oakridge’s small-town feel.

“I don’t want to see Oakridge become a thriving metropolis like Eugene; I just would like to see its small-town vibe remain,” Crosby said. “At the same time, get a few jobs in here that you know would help benefit so many people.”

He describes himself as a family man who wants to preserve Oakridge’s outdoors.

Crosby, however, cited a lack of motivation in the City Council meetings he attended. He said, “I think I could turn that around.”

He said he’s noticed complaints about the current ambulance fee on Oakridge citizens’ water bills, but said he’d “like to see some more research about what the current funding for the ambulance is and how those funds are being spent.”

He also mentioned Oakridge’s biking infrastructure.

“Oakridge is known as the mountain biking capital of the Northwest, but yet there are no bike lanes anywhere in the city. So that’s something I would like to address also,” Crosby said.

He said he’d have to do more research on how he’d address the biking infrastructure issues.

Finally, a priority of his is attracting full-time decent-paying employers to the largely empty industrial park that sits in Oakridge.

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