Richard Riggs was born in Portland but has lived in many parts of the state.

"My family moved around a lot following mill jobs as the mills were closing in the 1970s and 1980s," he said.

He ended up in Oakridge, a mill town outside of Eugene.

During the `80s one of the mills closed, businesses left town and there was very little work.

"It was really a tough existence down there for a long time, and still is because there are really no jobs there," he said.

Riggs said that after the mills closed Oakridge was devastated. He said that the town has still not fully recovered after nearly 30 years. This is an issue he said is one of his passions.

"After congress failed to pass the ONC to extend timber payments for counties, 33 out of 36 counties are going to suffer drastic cutbacks in their budgets. We need to figure out a way to make those counties self sufficient," he said.

After living in a town that was shutting down, Riggs realized what so many others realize. One way out was the military.

"I realized early on that I needed to get out of Oakridge, and my family had a lot of history in the Navy," he said.

When he was 17 years old he went to boot camp. He spent his first six years in the Navy as an enlisted man, working his way through ranks. He then received a commission and spent his last 14 years as a surface warfare officer.

Riggs served on three different ships including the USS O'Kane which fired nine of the 19 Tomahawk missiles into Iraq during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. He was the operations officer on that ship.

In 2006 he made the decision to retire from service because he had no trust in the Bush Administration.  If he had stayed in, he could very well have been in command of a ship.
Riggs said he believes that to be a leader the people you lead should trust you to make the right choices.

"I was really unhappy with Bush and some of his policies and wanted to start working in the political process, something I couldn't do while in the Navy," he said. After he left the Navy he moved to Salem.

"I didn't know what I really wanted to do as a second career but knew I would probably need some additional schooling," he said.  He decided to go to law school at Willamette University.

When he came back to Oregon he contacted the Polk County Democratic Party to let them know he wanted to get involved. The party made him the candidate search committee chairman.
"I thought that was a great way to get involved," he said. He also decided to run for a Chemeketa Community College board position.

Not long after he won that seat, both Marion and Polk counties asked him to run for state representative.

"I turned everybody down; I didn't want to run for state representative," he said.

At Willamette University there was a program called Street Law where students went to Chemeketa Community College and taught classes to teen moms who were trying to get their
high school diploma.

"I was talking to them about our government and how they could get involved. I went home after teaching that class and realized I needed to run for state representative," he said.

There are several issues that Riggs plans to address if elected. Two of the major ones are health care and education.

"Six hundred thousand Oregonians don't have healthcare; we have an educational system that is falling apart from lack of investment. Those are the top two issues that people want to talk about when I am out knocking on doors," he said.

Riggs said that classrooms are overcrowded, textbooks outdated, and many schools don't have the resources to do so much as heat their buildings.

"I can't tell you how many people I've talked to that said they had photocopies of textbooks, and teachers who said their classrooms in the wintertime were 56 degrees and would have to take their class to the library because it was too cold," he said.

He went on to say that Oregon spends 45 million dollars a year on retention cost.

A new program he would like to see installed would create a mentorship for teachers. He said a program he had been working with called Stand for Children had created a plan that would spend 15 million every other year and better equip teachers to handle situations in the classroom.

The issue of healthcare seems to be an ongoing and seemingly unsolvable problem in the United States. Riggs has some ideas that he hopes to have addressed.

"We are the only industrialized Western Country that doesn't provide healthcare to our citizens," he said. He would like to start working on creating smaller clinics in neighborhoods. These clinics would provide healthcare for people who get sick but don't necessarily need to be in an emergency room.

"We spend 50 percent more than other countries; a lot of that money is spent in emergency rooms. If someone doesn't have health care where do they go? They go to the emergency room," he said.

Riggs said the experience of being both a military officer and a father make him qualified for state representative. It has given him the experience leading and earning the trust of those he led.

"For there to be success then there must be trust," he said.