Copyright 2001 The Register-Guard. All rights reserved.)

ON OCT. 9, Terry Beyer - wife of former state Sen. Lee Beyer, D- Springfield - placed fourth out of five nominees who sought to represent Springfield in the Oregon House of Representatives. Exactly one month later, Terry Beyer was sworn in as our new state representative.

How could this have happened? How does this travesty of democratic process impact grass-roots party activism in Lane County and throughout Oregon?

Major political parties may be governed from the top by their national committees, but they need us precinct workers in the trenches to win elections. The precinct is the smallest political unit in the country. Most precinct workers are elected officials who represent our neighborhoods to our parties at county and state levels.

Sometimes we represent our precincts at special nominating conventions to fill legislative vacancies; Oregon law requires that such vacancies be filled by appointees of the same political party as the person who vacates the office. This happened last September when Sen. Beyer resigned to accept appointment by Gov. John Kitzhaber to the Public Utilities Commission.

Lane County's precinct workers typically send to the Board of Commissioners the names of three nominees who win the most convention votes: In this case, the commissioners chose State Rep. Bill Morrisette, D-Springfield, from our list of three to become Springfield's new state senator.

Morrisette's appointment, however, then created a vacancy in the House of Representatives. This time, five nominees stepped forward: Rick Henson, Tom Atkinson, Ken Nickel, Fred Simmons and Terry Beyer.

None of these five nominees objected when our convention voted unanimously to send the commissioners the names of our top three vote-getters. After we interviewed all five about their positions on health care, education, land use planning, election reform, fund raising and the 2002 campaign, each precinct worker voted by secret ballot for three nominees. Atkinson, Henson and Nickel each won a majority vote of the convention, so we forwarded a list of their names to the commissioners.

Two days later, Terry Beyer filed to run for state representative in next year's primary election. She blamed (and continues to blame) her defeat at the convention on her lack of direct union affiliation. There is no evidence to justify her implication that organized labor kept her name off the list. If Beyer assumes that some sinister labor strategy had prevailed, then union member Fred Simmons would have been listed instead of businessman Tom Atkinson. So for reasons other than union affiliation, neither Simmons nor Beyer won enough votes to make our list.

At this point, county commissioners were supposed to interview our three winning nominees to decide who should fill the House vacancy. But on Oct. 24, three of the commissioners voted to cancel those interviews, expressing their anger that Terry Beyer had failed to be listed.

Commissioner Bill Dwyer accused us of pulling "shenanigans" before or during the House convention, improprieties we precinct workers did not commit, nor which Dwyer ever specified - until a Register-Guard guest editorial criticizing his accusation prompted him to denounce us for not listing Beyer because she's a woman! Had Dwyer bothered to attend our convention, the women precinct workers who comprised half of our eligible voters could have disabused him of his ridiculous notion.

By refusing to choose from among our nominees, the commissioners shunted their responsibility to Gov. Kitzhaber, who at first declared his annoyance at having to select our new state representative. "It's nothing that I really welcome. I think the local process needs to work," he said.

And it would have worked if Kitzhaber had respected our judgment by interviewing our three nominees. But he let his aides limit his interviews to Atkinson, Henson and Beyer, thus freezing out Ken Nickel, who earned twice as many convention votes as did Beyer. Then, on Nov. 5, the governor officially selected Terry Beyer to serve in the Oregon House until 2003.

The Springfield News on Nov. 10 noted the questionable appearance of Kitzhaber's selection: "The governor should not have been involved ... . Once (Beyer's name) went to the governor, didn't it seem likely that Kitzhaber would select Beyer, especially since he had already appointed her husband to the PUC? Sounds like a lot of back-door politics that leaves a bad taste in the mouth."

By allowing our commissioners to deny Springfield's precinct workers the ability to fill a vacancy for our local representative, and by letting those commissioners insult our winning nominees by refusing to interview them, Kitzhaber sends a chilling message to party activists statewide: if a nominee cannot succeed according to party bylaws, then all he or she needs to do is inspire a commissioner to swing a vote to pass the board's duty up to Salem, where another politician can impose that losing nominee upon the district.

Rick Klaastad is House District 42 chairman of the Democratic Party of Lane County. On Nov. 13, the precinct committee members of House District 42 approved a resolution endorsing the views Klaastad expresses in this column.