Amanda Page, a citizen of the Klamath Tribes, is running for Deschutes County Commissioner, Seat 3, and aims to have a political seat in a county that encompasses some of the ancestral homelands of her people.
“I’m an Indigenous candidate, but I’m also an Indigenous candidate looking to get a seat in our territory. In my ancestral lands,” Page said. “So there’s an importance to that that I think most people don’t understand. This is a real chance to expand tribal sovereignty and have Indigenous voice[s] in the spaces historically, we’ve been completely ignored.”
Page has spent her career working in emergency services, first as a volunteer firefighter while in college and then as a flight paramedic at Life Flight Network, where she now works as the Social Responsibility & Belonging Advisor. She is also Redmond School Board Director, where she has been elected to serve on the board twice, having been on the board since 2023. Page is also one of only three people for all four seats who has governing experience, she said.
If elected for Deschutes County Commissioner, Seat 3, Page plans to focus policy on prioritizing affordable housing, championing environmental protections and supporting tribal sovereignty.
Page joined Underscore Native News + ICT via zoom from her home in Deschutes County, Oregon.
Underscore Native News + ICT: Tell me about your platform and what issues are important to you.
Amanda Page: Our county, it just became the most wealthy county in Oregon, but you wouldn’t know it talking to people who are providing critical services in our county, and people are having to live with multiple other adults in small apartments just to make ends meet. It’s just wildly expensive compared to income here, and so I really see the county playing a role in using what draws in people to this county.
It’s a beautiful place, a very touristy destination. People own a lot of second homes here, and there’s a lot of short term rentals. And so I really see a way that we can make that beauty and draw of our county work for the people who work here. By placing fees on short term rentals and second homes and creating an affordability fund that then can supplement rent, it can supplement mortgage, it can supplement affordable housing supply. It can supplement child care, transportation.
On the environmental side, the whole reason why I got excited about this is because of the Thornburg Resort that is planned to be built just outside of Redmond, where I live. It’s a luxury resort that originally had three golf courses, a private water skiing lake. This insane use of water in an area that is a desert climate where we’re consistently showing lower and lower water tables and availability.
And, just down the river, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs have noticed a decline in the health of their trout. I went out there fishing with some local guides, and we caught fish, and we looked at them and they have parasites, black dot parasites, on the bottom of these trout, and they’re really suffering because of the water quality and the decrease in water there. And as this development was being created, tribes were never consulted about how this might affect their hunting and fishing rights. And then when they did speak up and say, ‘Hey, this is going to affect us,’ they were pretty much told by the county, ‘well, that’s not our problem. That sounds like a state issue.’ Which is wild and just the lack of understanding of what tribal sovereignty is and what the treaty rights that have been around 150 years, more than that 170 years, mean for them and their ability to sustain themselves. On the environmental side, it’s saying no to those luxury developments, especially when they affect tribal sovereignty, but also just affecting the environment. We don’t have enough water here, or maybe we do have enough water, we’re just not using it in a way that is responsible.
So really focusing on developments that are mindful of that, that we’re not developing in areas where there’s not water available, or if there is now that we can’t say with a really high degree of certainty in seven generations, there will still be water available here. And so those are the things that I really focus my campaign on. Taking care of people, especially people who live and work here and contribute to society, and then also that piece of taking care of the environment.
I think the way that differs from other campaigns who are more progressive is that there’s a feeling in Deschutes County that you have to be super moderate, all of your policy has to be moderate. You can’t be too extreme, you can’t be too progressive, because then people won’t vote for you. And when you do that, you completely leave out groups of people. No one’s willing to take strong stances on how the county can protect our community members who are immigrants from ICE. They don’t want to make those big, bold statements. They don’t want to put really hard stop limits on development. They’re really staying in this lane of we just want to slightly move forward and make it a little bit better than what it is when times are so desperate that that slight incremental movement is not going to be enough to save us here.
UNN + ICT: How do you plan to address housing, cost of living, and healthcare concerns in your county?
Page: I have a passion for public health and mental and behavioral health services, and this last year and a half has just been really concerning with funding cuts and how they’re affecting our departments. Right now, funding has remained somewhat stable, but now we’re going to start to see the decrease in payments from Medicaid, Medicare. Now that a lot of people have been accessing our services, we probably aren’t going to have that anymore. I’m really concerned about what does that look like for the overall budget of public health?
Because when we think about public health, it’s not just how are we vaccinating people in times of emergency? It’s maternal and prenatal care, how people can access mental and behavioral health services for our community. It’s clean needle exchanges, it’s harm reduction, it’s all of these things that deeply impact our county and disproportionately affect groups who have been pushed to the margins historically. And so for me, policy around that looks like ensuring that we have adequate funding, and that becomes one of those sacred spaces where you don’t compromise funding, because it’s already pretty bare bones. The funding that’s going to be coming in is going to be less.
We are lucky in that our health services department is really creative, and they have been able to get a lot of grants and funding because they’re willing to try things that other counties haven’t tried yet. So their innovation has led to some funding sources that other people haven’t received. I would like to continue that and expand that to create additional revenue for our county and consistently work on being on that leading edge of what’s next so that people are looking to Deschutes County to solve these problems.
The housing piece, I’m not an expert on this. I’ve spent a lot of time learning about it.
And so a lot of the ideas that I think are really important [that come from other people], are having safe, managed camps that are in areas that are low wildland fire risk, that also have access to services that people need. That’s just really the starting jumping off point.
People say that homelessness is a result of addiction, substance abuse, mental health. But more often than not, it’s affordability. When you look at the number one indicator of increased levels of homelessness in any community, it is lack of affordability in an area, and that’s Deschutes County.
For me, that’s where that affordability fund comes into play. Instead of viewing housing as a problem of we just need to create more houses, we also need to view it as a problem of affordability. And so providing rental assistance to people who are either on the verge of experiencing homelessness or who are in it, who are working full time, who just need supplemental income to get into their houses. That’s what we could use that affordability fund for, because providing assistance and rent is the number one way you get people out of homelessness.
