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Sarah Duncan and Maria Hinojos Pressey are running together as a Democratic slate for the Marion County Board of Commissioners, in a county Republicans have held for more than forty years. Sarah is challenging Kevin Cameron for Position 1. Maria is challenging Colm Willis for Position 2. Win both seats, and the majority flips. Forty years, over.

Sarah went to college to become a doctor. Then, studying for the MCAT, she was diagnosed with narcolepsy with cataplexy, and the life she had planned fell away. She came home to Salem, tried to catch the bus, and got stranded on her very first try. So she did the thing most people wouldn't. She got herself onto the board of the transit district to fix it. Transportation, she'll tell you, is freedom.

Maria is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, a mother, and at thirty-one the first Latina and youngest board president of Salem's transit district. She moved to Oregon while pregnant, taught newly arrived refugees how to ride a bus system that barely ran, and asked the question that started everything: where are all the buses? Years later, an ICE agent walked into her backyard, left the gate open, and walked away like nothing had happened.

They met as transit nerds and found they wanted the same things. They both organize for PCUN, Oregon's largest farmworker union. And they watched a county government that would rather sue the state than serve the people inside it. Everyone said the race wasn't winnable. They ran the numbers, and ran anyway, together, sharing everything, going after the voters everyone else had written off.

Listen to what they're building.

Guests: Sarah Duncan and Maria Hinojos Pressey, Candidates for Marion County Commissioner

Hosts: Eric McGuire and Katherine Watkins

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#OregonVoicesPodcast #MarionCounty #SalemOregon #MarionCountyOR #SarahDuncan #MariaHinojosPressey #VoteLocal #LocalElections #OregonPolitics #OregonVotes #CommunityLeadership #PublicTransit #HousingJustice #DisabilityJustice #ImmigrantRights #WorkingFamilies #PublicHealth #OrganizingWorks #PeoplePoweredPolitics #Vote2026

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This week on Oregon Voices Podcast, we sit down with Denise Piza and Lisa Finkle, two women running to change the direction of SEIU 503, Oregon's largest public employee union. Denise came to this country from Guadalajara as a young child, learned English fast enough to become her family's interpreter by age eight, and built a path through advocacy that started in the only place advocacy ever really starts. A school meeting where someone tried to tell her that her son's autism was her fault for being a young mother. She fought that fight until she won it, then kept fighting, landing on the Jefferson County Education Service District Board, then becoming the first Mexican woman elected to the Madras City Council, winning her seat as a write in candidate after the ballots had already gone out.

Lisa was born and raised in Oregon, has worked for the state for over a decade, and became the chief union steward for SEIU 503 after discovering, the way most people discover it, that nobody was there for her when she needed a union to actually show up. Together, Denise and Lisa lay out exactly what is broken inside their own union. Town halls where the chat gets disabled before members can ask questions. Financial transparency that exists on paper and nowhere else. A culture where Robert's Rules of Order gets used as a tool to keep people quiet rather than a tool to let them speak. Where racism, discrimination, and sexual harassment get processed through channels controlled by the very people accused of causing harm.

Denise talks about being invited to coffee by a former city councilman so he could explain, politely, how unqualified she was. She talks about what it means to build power with your community instead of hoarding it. And she and Lisa both talk about what it looks like when 46,000 union members realize the table they have been sitting at was never built to hold them, and what happens when they finally stand up.


#OregonVoicesPodcast #DenisePiza #LisaFinkle #SEIU503 #UnionReform #MemberLedUnion #MadrasOregon #WoodburnOregon #LatinaLeadership #UnionTransparency #UnionDemocracy #OregonHealthAuthority #LanguageAccess #AutismAdvocacy #WriteInCampaign #ImmigrantStory #WorkerPower #PublicSectorUnion #UnionAccountability #OregonLabor #FutureSlate #McKenzieReyes #OregonPolitics #LivedExperience

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This week on Oregon Voices Podcast, we sit with Juan Carlos Ordoñez, Communications Director for the Oregon Center for Public Policy and host of the syndicated radio show and podcast Policy for the People. Juan Carlos was born in Guatemala during the longest civil war in Central America, came to the United States with his family in the 1980s, went on to Harvard Law School, and practiced commercial litigation in New York City before walking away from that life and landing, eventually, in Oregon. Now he spends his days doing something most lawyers never do with their training. He explains this state's tax system to the people it is burying.

Eric McGuire hosts alongside State Representative Lesly Munoz, who serves Oregon House District 22, filling in while Katherine attends a Rural Organizing Project retreat. Together they dig into what it would actually take to build a millionaire's tax in Oregon, why the legislature's disconnect from the federal tax bill left hundreds of millions on the table, and how Oregon's much vaunted progressive reputation hides a tax structure that asks more of the poor than the rich. Juan Carlos breaks down workforce standards boards, the fight to renew and expand the Oregon Kids Credit, the long overdue push for universal preschool, and why subsidizing data centers and corporate research credits often amounts to handing money to companies for doing what they were going to do anyway.

Lesly brings her own story into the conversation, the daughter of a landscaper and a homemaker, the first in her family to walk the halls of the Capitol, carrying the failed 2025 farmworker standards board bill and a promise to bring it back in 2027. Between the two of them, this episode lays out exactly what it would take to turn Oregon's tax system right side up, and why the people with the least are still paying the most.

Thanks for listening to the Oregon Voices Podcast!

If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Sharing the show with others helps these stories travel farther.

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