Marilyn Kittelman

Marilyn Kittelman is the Republican candidate running for Oregon State Senate in the 4th Senate District. Her opponent is Floyd Prozanski of the Democratic party. She is a fifth generation Oregonian.
Family
In 1988, Marilyn married her childhood sweetheart, cutting horse trainer John Kittelman. Together, they have three children: son, Angus (20) completes his Bachelors Degree at OSU in 2010, daughter Sage (18) has her associate’s degree and is working toward a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering; and son, McCrae (12) is continuing in the family tradition of being homeschooled.
John, Marilyn and the kids spent every day together training cutting horses and ranching until the entire family became involved in politics when a senate bill passed which negatively affected their way of life. Marilyn became active fighting on behalf of land owners and the family picked up the slack so she could continue showing cutting horses.
Political History
Because of her activism, Marilyn was recruited to serve on the Douglas County Planning Commission and soon became Vice Chair. In 2004, with the support of John and the kids, Marilyn was elected as a Douglas County Commissioner. She served in that capacity for four years.
As Commissioner, Marilyn focused on making government accessible to the people, especially those living in the outlying areas of her large district. She implemented regular meetings of the board of Commissioners in rural locations and led the move to televise county meetings and broadcast them live, and archived, on the internet. Using technology, citizens living in Reedsport, 75 miles from the county seat, could participate in live planning commission meetings from a remote location in their own city.
After the Supreme Court upheld the Kelo Decision, which allows government to condemn and seize private property simply to resell for higher taxes, Marilyn crafted an ordinance to make that practice illegal in Douglas County. That law was unanimously adopted by the Board of Commissioners and will continue to protect property owners in the future. Copies of that ordinance were requested and used as a model by elected officials around the country.
Marilyn opposed Marine Reserves, realizing how detrimental they would be to our already economically depressed coastal communities. She drafted a resolution which was passed unanimously by the Oregon Association of Counties. The resolution sent a strong message the legislature that Commissioners across Oregon opposed implementing Marine Reserves.
As Commissioner, Marilyn had oversight of a $100 million dollar annual budget and executive oversight of 800 employees. She exhibited strong fiscal responsibility and through creative leadership brought common sense to the office. One example of her guidance was substituting the purchase of a $390,000 crane for a contract to lease one as needed.
She organized BASIC (Budget Accountability & Savings Investigative Commission), a group of non-governmental, business owners who, over several months, dissected the county budget and made millions of dollars of cost saving recommendations including the idea of combining 21 county departments into 7 super departments which would have eliminated 14 department heads a savings of over a million dollars each year!
Marilyn believes her most important achievements as Commissioner was helping individual people work through the morass of government regulations to retain or regain their property rights and to see their dreams to fruition.
After serving four years as Commissioner, Marilyn became co-owner of the Roseburg Beacon Newspaper. At the end of her first year as co-publisher/executive editor of the weekly newspaper, the publication had doubled both in size and the number of subscribers.
Although many papers across the nation continue to fail, The Beacon is growing rapidly, and now has subscribers in 30 states. People still enjoy reading newspapers, but they are disenchanted with those who misreport the facts, they simply can’t believe what they read. The popularity of the Beacon, she believes, is due to the honesty in reporting. In fact, the motto of the paper is “The Beacon, because you can handle the truth.”
Marilyn watched and reported last legislative session, as our elected representatives attacked tax payers and business owners, and heaped additional regulations on already struggling natural resource industries. They voted to blow the Klamath Dams, banned grass seed growers from burning, and created ‘wilderness areas’ in the ocean called Marine Reserves.
The final straw was when Marilyn’s opponent, the incumbent, came to town lauding the benefits Measures 66 & 67. She filed to run for Senate shortly after those measures passed and her opponent issued a statement claiming that increasing taxes would bring more business to Oregon!
Marilyn has always had an open door policy, and will continue to work for the voters, not against them. She has taken the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” vowing to “oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes”. To balance Oregon’s budget she will reduce costs and regulations, not continue on the spending binge of the current legislature.
Marilyn thinks that saving Oregon’s economy and putting people back to work go hand in hand and that the de-industrialization and de-capitalization of Oregon has got to stop. She plans to lead the effort to get government out of the way and make Oregon more business friendly.
Most people have heard about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, but Marilyn is most concerned with the attack on personal freedom which is the result of actions taken by the legislature. Once elected, she promises to lead the effort to End the War on Freedom.

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