Kroger

Oregon Attorney General John Kroger wants to create a more business-friendly state, he told city leaders at a Heppner Chamber of Commerce meeting Thursday.

Rules and regulations that govern business are too complicated and numerous, he said, and an effort to prune and streamline those laws is under way.

“That’s a departure for us, but it’s desperately needed,” he said.

Kroger’s audience in Heppner filled the St. Patrick’s Senior Center dining room.?They included a group of government students from Heppner High School, the mayor, the district attorney and local priest Father Gerry Condon.

“I understand the need to encourage new businesses, but what about the old?” asked Bert Houweling. “We see increases in taxes and health insurance – every year, we’re getting an increase of some sort.”

Kroger said that Oregon does not do enough to sustain small businesses, which is a huge mistake. Big operations such as Nike and Les Schwab started as small businesses, he said, and the vast majority of jobs in the state are in small companies.

The legislature in Salem is understandably focused on balancing the budget, he said, but at the cost of neglecting the long-term picture.

“Everyone says the answer is green jobs, but they are going to be one percent of the economy,” he said. “It’s a growing sector of the economy, but it’s not how most people are going to make their living.”

The No. 2 industry in the state is agriculture, he said, and government should be concerned about keeping it vibrant and prosperous.

David Sykes, the editor of the Heppner Gazette Times, asked Kroger if it was true that the Oregon Secretary of State hired private investigators to ensure that signature-gatherers for ballot measures are complying with the law.

There is a group gathering signatures for a ballot measure that would overturn the legislature’s income-tax increases for corporations and higher-income people.

Kroger said that oversight into the signature-gathering process is a good idea.

“If there’s any evidence that (the inspectors) are targeting one ballot measure over another, that’s illegal and we’ll go after them,” Kroger said.

Local lawyer Bill Kuhn said that he knows people who have been cheated over the Internet, and asked what the Attorney General’s office is doing to combat scams.

“The Internet stuff is really bad, ” Kroger said. ” A lot of crimes are migrating to the Internet.”

There are two types of Internet crimes, he said – scams and predatory behavior. Scams include identification theft, in which people call or e-mail a victim and persuade them to reveal personal information such as a bank account number. A lot of those callers are from places such as Nigeria, China or the the Philippines, he said.

“As an attorney general, there’s almost nothing I can do to go after a scam artist in China,” Kroger said.

Kroger talked about his Scam Alert Network, which alerts people through e-mail about the latest Internet scam.

Predatory behavior or semi-fraudulent business practices, are harder to detect, he said. However, his office is working with Microsoft to figure out a way to uncover predatory behavior over the Internet.