Do not mistake Rep. Kevin Mannix’s town hall this week for a campaign function.

The Salem Republican made that clear to Bob Niemeyer, a fellow Republican legislative candidate, when Niemeyer began a campaign oration during Monday’s meeting. Niemeyer is running in House District 25 in the Tigard area.

This town hall was a state representative event, Mannix said, not a campaign event. State dollars cannot be used for campaign purposes.

Across Oregon this summer, lawmakers are conducting town halls, chatting with constituents. Naturally, many of their constituents are voters and thus potential supporters.

Mannix said his town halls sometimes draw up to a 100 or so folks. This one, the third in a series, was smaller. About a dozen people showed up to meet him at the IKE Box. The coffee shop’s location near the Oregon Capitol, coupled with its mission of helping divested youth, makes it a popular spot for politicians, state workers, Willamette University students and run-of-the-mill Salemites.

About half the participants were Mannix constituents. He represents a sort of boot-shaped House district that includes the Capitol, part of North Salem and Keizer.

Other attendees came to challenge Mannix’s views on criminal justice, or in Niemeyer’s case, to tout his own candidacy.

Mannix is among Oregon’s most successful politicians of recent decades, even though he lost races for governor, attorney general and Congress. He chaired the Oregon Republican Party. He wrote five successful ballot measures, including Measure 11 establishing mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes.

He returned to the Legislature last year, having previously served five terms in the House, starting as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat before converting to the Republican side. Regardless of party, he was known for his prodigious workload.

“During his previous time in the House, Mannix earned the nickname ‘Amend-O-Mannix,’ for his propensity to amend others’ bills, especially late in the session,” lobbyist and former legislator Rick Metzger recalled in a witty blog post last year.

Although still quite quotable, Mannix perhaps has mellowed a bit since departing the Legislature at the end of 2000.

He came across as a diligent, solution-focused member of the Democrat-controlled committee that reformed Measure 110 this year. Those changes take effect Sept. 1, as Mannix reminded the town hall participants.

As a member of the minority party, Mannix said, he focuses on what he can accomplish across the aisle. He’s meeting with Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek in September. He recently met with House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard, to discuss the upcoming 2025 legislative session.

“It is part of establishing relationships with colleagues so you can get things done,” he said.

It would have been fascinating to eavesdrop on the Mannix-Bowman conversation. As majority leader, Bowman works to elect more Democrats, including Mannix’s challenger this year, Salem city councilor Virginia Stapleton.

During Monday’s town hall, Mannix answered questions about transportation, vehicle taxes, criminal justice, Measure 110, mental health, judicial appointments, housing and homelessness, and other topics.

He praised Keizer’s work on homelessness and drug enforcement, saying the city “demonstrated how a positive, aggressive approach will work.”

“They’ve been very aggressive about saying, ‘We’re not putting up with the people blocking the sidewalks, camping on the sidewalks,’” he said. “I don’t think the city of Salem has had nearly the level of engagement.”

For the past 18 month or so, Mannix has been striving to turn the former Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility into a treatment/rehabilitation center to help address Oregon’s addiction and mental health crises. The sprawling campus in South Salem has been closed since 2017.

“You could have transitional housing for homeless, you could also have a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, you could also have a mental health center — separate elements of a complex issue,” Mannix said.

As for perennial candidate Niemeyer, he said he has been rewriting the Oregon Constitution since 2011.

Our state’s founding document is a jumbled mess of verbosity, cluttered with extraneous amendments that voters placed there to avoid tinkering by legislators. At more than 60,000 words, the Oregon Constitution is more than twice the size of the average state constitution and more than six times as long as the federal Constitution.

A self-employed engineer, Niemeyer says on his website that the proposed new state constitution “is designed to remove the opportunities for corruption and bloated government that have plagued the People of Oregon since about 1965.” In addition, such a constitution could be used to form two new states — Eastern Oregon and Jefferson — or possibly combine Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon into the state of Cascadia.

That cause seems as hopeless as Niemeyer’s quest for Congress in 2014, for governor in 2016, or this year for Bowman’s seat.

However, the beauty of Oregon politics is that practically any voter can run for office and for any reason.

Take Jim Crary of Ashland, who sought this year’s Democratic nomination for secretary of state. Since 2017, he has tried to get the secretary of state to add a tab on the state website enabling any voter to ask questions of any candidate who would be on that voter’s ballot.

“Obviously, I have not been successful,” Crary told me during his campaign. “So, rather than continuing the Sisyphean task of trying to convince someone else to implement my idea, I am running myself.”

He also was unsuccessful as a candidate. But he did finish a respectable third among the five Democrats, receiving 16,340 votes compared with winner Tobias Read’s 303,089.