A retired corrections officer who previously ran for state office is vying for a seat on the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners.
Glenn Gaither is the second candidate to file for the District 5 seat held by Lianne Thompson. Thompson is not running for re-election, but Gaither will face an opponent in the May 19 primary: Rand Dufka, a contractor from Arch Cape, who Thompson encouraged to run.
Gaither grew up in the Knappa area and graduated from Knappa High School. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and then the Army. Much of his professional life has been as a corrections officer in Washington state. He retired because of medical issues and returned to Clatsop County in 2019.
Gaither said if he is elected to the District 5 seat his priorities include bringing in better paying jobs and addressing issues like homelessness and drug addiction in the county.
“I’m not running to make money,” he said. “I’m not running to, you know, be popular or anything. But after I came back to the state, I saw all of these issues that are really types of cancers in the community that need to be eradicated.”
With the decline of the timber and fishing industries and the rise of tourism as an economic force over the years, Gaither said he sees a need to make Clatsop County a place people want to visit.
“So tourism being the focus of our economic structure here right now, we have to do things like clean up our communities,” Gaither said. “We can’t let the homeless stay out on every street corner and all along the waterfront where the tourists want to go and visit because that’s going to cost us revenues. Those revenues are used to help the homeless people. So the more money we got coming in, the better off everybody is.”
Gaither said he is not necessarily running in opposition to anyone — either Thompson and her approach to the position or Dufka. He believes they all want roughly the same things.
County commission seats are nonpartisan, but Gaither made a point of noting his affiliation with the Republican Party in his filing documents. He told KMUN it was about being transparent.
“It’s just a little bit more information that says, ‘Hey, this is who I am, this is the party I work with,’” Gaither said. “And if you want to ask people how I am in the party: I go after Republicans far more than I go after Democrats.”
In 2022 and 2024, Gaither ran unsuccessfully against then-Republican Cyrus Javadi for the House District 32 seat in the House Republican primary races in 2022 and 2024.
At the time, The Astorian reported that Gaither criticized Javadi’s middle-of-the-road approach and advocated for harder line positions on issues such as education, abortion and public safety.
Javadi has since switched to the Democratic Party, saying he no longer sees his values reflected in the Republican Party.
Gaither said he was initially motivated to run for the House because of changes he saw in Oregon school districts around topics such as sexuality and race. He worked with the culturally conservative group the Knappa Parents Organization which had challenged the Knappa School District’s curriculum and response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When he was running in 2024, Gaither downplayed the Jan.6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. When asked about that now by KMUN, Gaither said: “It was an incident. It was not a good incident. It was not intentionally set up to turn out that way. People got out of control. You know, that’s human nature.”
“So when people say, ‘Hey, Jan.6,’ I’m like, yeah, that was wrong, but let’s say that 100 days of riots by Antifa in Portland was wrong also,” Gaither added. “Let’s say that people burning cars, destroying buildings in a riot, which was called a peaceful protest, was also wrong. Violence is not the answer.”
Candidate filing is now closed. Ballots for the May primary will begin to be mailed at the end of April and beginning of May.
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Click on the links below for more coverage from KMUN on the May 19 primary and the candidates in the running for seats on the County Board of Commissioners…