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Friends and Neighbors,
When
I wrote the last newsletter a couple of weeks ago, it felt as if we’d be going
right up to our constitutional end date, July 11, but it now seems as if we
just may finish a week earlier, just before or just after the Fourth of July. Budgets are moving, tough issues are finally
being resolved, while others are being let go for another session. Other than construction bonding decisions
that still need to be made and some decisions around tax credits, the one big unresolved
issue is the transportation package. I’ll
let you know more about that one at the end of this newsletter.
The
last couple of weeks have been exciting for me personally, as several of my priorities—statewide
sick leave, “ban the box,” asbestos testing of residences prior to demolition,
and even the resolution recognizing Peace Corps veterans, at last made their
way through the Legislature. Others,
such as Access to Opportunity (Tuition Equity 2.0) and the Children’s Toxics
bill, are poised to move to the floor this week or next. Really exciting. I’ll talk about some of them in this
newsletter as well.
As
I mentioned in the last newsletter, policy committees are no longer
meeting. All the policy action—on bills
that still need amendments or that are still trying to find majority support—is
now in House or Senate Rules Committees.
Most of the remaining work is now related to the budget, as bills with
price tags are being heard and voted on in the various subcommittees of Joint
Ways and Means. Most of the
subcommittees will finish up their work this week.
So,
my next newsletter may well be the one celebrating sine die (end of session).
Believe me, I can’t wait!!!
It’s the 7th Edition of our Annual Bike Town Hall
and we are excited to bike a 6 mile loop in the Lents Neighborhood this
weekend!
The forecast calls for
potential triple-digit temperatures, so be sure to hydrate and wear cool
clothing and lots of sunscreen! I hope
you’ll join me and my partners-in-helmets Alissa Keny-Guyer and Barbara Smith
Warner for this tour of happenings in the southern part of the district. Riders of all speeds and skill levels are welcome.
Meet at 12:30pm on
Sunday 6/28 at the Lents International Farmers Market (SE 92nd &
Foster Road). Please be on time so we
can get the ride underway as scheduled!
More details on the route further down in this newsletter.
Our
July constituent coffee will be delayed a couple of weeks, to avoid the weekend
of the 4th and because I will be out of town the weekend following
that. So, please join me on Saturday,
July 18th at the Hollywood Senior Center for what will be a wrap-up
of the legislative session. I will give
you the low-down on what passed, what didn’t, and all of the task forces and
workgroups that will be consuming my time during the interim. If there is a bill or issue of particular
interest, I’ll give an update on that as well.
Constituent
Coffee
Saturday,
July 18th at 9am
Hollywood
Senior Center (1820 NE 40th Ave)
On June 10 I was honored and humbled to
bring SB 454 to the Senate floor for approval. We had a long, vigorous floor debate on the
issue (click here to read my floor speech) and ultimately passed the bill on a 17-13 vote.
Two days later the bill passed the House on a 33-24 (with 3 excused)
vote. Once SB 454 is signed into law by
Governor Brown (as she has promised to do), Oregon will become the fourth state
in the nation with a statewide policy on sick leave—overall, the strongest
state policy enacted to date. You can
read more about the new policy in this report from The Lund Report.
It
took enormous effort to keep this bill alive and maintain its integrity over
the many months since we first heard it in committee back in February. Despite a lot of pressure to compromise on
its core principles, we actually wound up with a program that maintains those
principles AND is better in many ways than the original proposal. It will be easier for employers to implement,
while making sure that workers in all industries get the sick leave they
need. Next step: the signing ceremony
with the Governor!
HB 3025 is another important bill that seeks to help
individuals traditionally excluded from getting onto a path to prosperity. Its purpose is to give ex-offenders who have
done their time, who have paid their obligation to society for their
wrongdoing, a shot at rebuilding their lives and being able to support
themselves and their families. The bill
makes it an unlawful employment practice to exclude an applicant from an
initial interview solely because of a past criminal conviction.
Ex-offenders face many obstacles after they have done
their time and are seeking to find employment (and housing as well). “The Box” is only one of them. “The Box” is that box on a job application
that asks the applicant to indicate whether or not they have ever been convicted
of a crime. In most cases, checking that
box is a sure way to send their application into the recycling bin. What the ex-offender needs is a chance to
meet the employer face to face, explain the circumstances of their crime, and
provide examples of their successful rehabilitation. That’s the fair chance that they seek. HB
3025 will provide it.
Six other states-- Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New
Jersey, and Rhode Island—have passed similar legislation affecting both public
and private employers.
This was one of those bills that came to the Senate
Workforce Committee demanding a lot of me as the committee chair. It had passed the House 33-27, with all
Republicans voting against it. The
Senate President asked me to work on it with one of our Republican
colleagues—Senator Jackie Winters of Salem—to see if I could come up with a
version that would attract some measure of bipartisan support. Senator Winters had a powerful interest in
this issue because her own late husband, Ted (author of the memoir Lifer) had been an ex-offender with a
life sentence, who turned out to be walking success story for giving someone a
second chance. As an African American,
she also understands the extent to which this problem has an inordinate effect
on minorities.
I’m pleased to say that we succeeded in coming up with
a set of good amendments that got us several Republican votes (with the bill
passing 21-8, with one excused) and a great new statewide program to help
ex-offenders get back into the mainstream.
At the same time, Senator Winters and I introduced SB
969, which creates the Task Force on Reentry, Employment, and Housing—because
Ban the Box alone will not remove all the many barriers that ex-offenders face
in their lives.
Oh,
yes, I almost forgot one of the most important committees of this session: the
joint committee on implementing Measure 91 (aka, the Marijuana Committee). That committee’s work has been beset by a
number of conflicts over the last several months--some between the two
political parties, some between the House and the Senate. Most, interestingly, were related to the
existing medical marijuana system. The
challenge has been to find the right way to keep the medical system and the
recreational system separate but coordinated.
I think it would be fair to say that many people without a real medical
need are using the existing medical system because they have nowhere else to go
aside from the black market of illegal sales.
The post-M91 implementation effort is designed to induce these
individuals to grow their own or purchase from state-run recreational sales
locations.
The
committee seems to have nailed down its final agreements last week. One of the biggest challenges had to do with
whether or not local jurisdictions should have the ability to prohibit
dispensaries in their locales. M91 made
that possible for recreational sales but mandated no changes in medical sales. Last
year the Legislature allowed local governments to prohibit medical
dispensaries, but only temporarily. That
moratorium is now running out, so it’s important for the Legislature to decide
what’s next.
I’m
personally opposed to prohibitions on medical sales, particularly once we’ve
managed to limit the medical system to those who really need it. However, there are many Oregonians who do not
want to see dispensaries in their neighborhood, particularly in those areas
where most people disapprove of marijuana, recreational or medical. This is especially true of the rural,
Republican-dominated parts of the state.
Ultimately,
the committee has decided to distinguish between those counties where there was
strong opposition to M91 (55% or more disapproval) and those where there was
not. Those that disapproved when the
measure came to the ballot will be able to prohibit dispensaries. (Residents
could overturn that decision through the initiative process, but this is
probably unlikely.) Those counties that
largely supported the measure or defeated it with less than 55% of the vote
will still be able to ban dispensaries, but only via a referral to the voters
of the county. In effect, nearly all of
Oregon east of the Cascades will be able to prohibit easily, while most of the areas
west of the Cascades will have to go to the ballot box to prohibit it via a
vote of local residences.
In
2013, after many years of trying, we finally passed HB 2787, which brought
Tuition Equity to Oregon. Henceforth,
the children of undocumented workers, children who had been brought up here and
graduated from Oregon high schools, could qualify for in-state tuition at our
universities. It has brought a new ray
of hope for some very talented, hard-working young Oregonians.
However,
not long after it went into effect, I began to hear from staff at community
colleges and universities around the state that HB 2787 had a couple of flaws
that were creating unintended barriers to some students. In our 2011 version of the bill, at the
recommendation of the Department of Justice, we put some arbitrary deadlines
into the bill. These are creating
problems.
First,
to be eligible, students must enroll in the university within three years of
high school graduation. This is creating
problems for some students who have chosen to go to community college before
transferring to a university. For
financial or family reasons, they may not be ready to transfer that quickly. (It’s not unusual for community college
students to take longer than three years to get through their lower-division
courses).
Second,
access to in-state tuition is only good for five years. Finishing within five years is a potential problem
for those students who choose to begin at the university. It is not unusual for students to take longer
than five years to complete their bachelor’s degree. If students need to take time off or attend
part-time for work or family reasons, they will find themselves losing
eligibility.
So
why did we put these deadlines into the bill?
At the time, California’s tuition equity law was being challenged and
had been overturned by the California Court of Appeals. Our Department of Justice felt that our bill
would more easily withstand a challenge if we had deadlines like this. Soon after, the California Supreme Court
reversed that decision and unanimously upheld tuition equity. At that point, we should have stripped out
the deadlines (no other state’s tuition equity law has them), but didn’t. Now we must, and that is the initial reason
for SB 932, the Access to Opportunity Act.
We’ve
also decided to use the bill to address another major barrier that these
students face: the lack of access to financial aid. If their parents were legal residents, most
would be eligible for a federal Pell Grant of $5,775 per year. They are not, and there’s nothing we can do
about that. But we can grant them access
to state need-based aid (up to $2,100 per year), as other states (including
Texas, California, Washington, New Mexico, Minnesota, and Illinois) have
done. That’s the third thing that SB 932
does.
Critics
will say that we are thinning the soup by extending the Oregon Opportunity
Grant to these students. Well, in fact
we are not. One of the very positive
outcomes of our improved budgetary condition this year is that the Legislature
is increasing the Opportunity Grant by nearly 24% in the next biennium. That means that more than 13,000 additional
students will be able to receive a state grant next year. Of those, the Higher Education Coordinating
Commission estimates that around 350 undocumented students will be able to
receive one.
Clearly,
this will not compromise the program in any way. It will make a huge difference for some very
low-income students in need of a lift. I’ve
gotten to know many of these students, both as a college teacher and as a
legislator—I can tell you that they are well worth the investment.
Keep
your fingers crossed!
You
may remember the Health Care financing study bill (HB 3260) that we passed in
2013. It called on the Oregon Health
Authority to oversee a study of different ways of creating and financing
universal health care in Oregon. It was an
exciting accomplishment, in part because the bill laid out the principles of
what would constitute true universal health care. However, because of budgetary constraints in
2013, no state money could be used to fund the study—the plan was to raise the
necessary resources through grants and philanthropy. Some money has been raised over the last
couple of years, but we remain a few hundred thousand dollars short of what is
need. So we had to come back to the
Legislature to extend the timeline for the study and seek some state dollars.
I’m
happy to report that the Human Services subcommittee of Ways and Means voted
today to approve an allocation of $300,000 for the study. This is wonderful news.
As
I mentioned at the top, one of the main pieces of unfinished business that is
still out there is the long-awaited transportation package. We came into this session hoping to pass a
substantial road improvement package based on an increase in the state gas tax
and vehicle registration fees. This was
a high priority for the business community, for rural Oregon, and for
legislators of both parties. State and
local roads need maintenance, bridges need repairs, and we need the good jobs
that such infrastructure projects create.
It
was always going to be a challenge, however, as tax increases always are. Remember, to raise revenues, the Oregon
Legislature is constitutionally required to pass both chambers with a 3/5
super-majority. If all 18 Senate
Democrats agreed on the package, it could conceivably pass on a party-line
vote. In the House, where the Democrats
are one seat short of a super-majority, at least one Republican vote would be
needed.
As
a result, the Republicans have leverage if a transportation package is to be
funded, and they are using it. They are
holding out for the repeal of the Clean Fuels bill (SB 324), the controversial
carbon-reduction bill that the Legislature passed early in the session. They have made it clear that they would not
support even a modest increase in the gas tax without the repeal of Clean
Fuels. Needless to say, this creates
real problems for those of us who would like to see us improving our road
infrastructure but who are committed to reducing our carbon footprint. (Clean
Fuels is the only significant climate-change bill to pass this session.) That
certainly includes me, as one of the chief sponsors of the Clean Fuels bill.
The
Governor, who has made the transportation package a priority for all the right
reasons, has been pressing the Legislature to see if there isn’t a way to agree
on a plan that would replace Clean Fuels with something that uses a different
mechanism to get to the same carbon-reduction ends. So, the Senate President and the Speaker of
the House put together a special committee to explore the possibility of a
comparable alternative to Clean Fuels, along with a transportation package that
can pass.
The
8-member group met behind the scenes with the Governor’s staff over a number of
weeks. Reports leaked out that it was getting close to a recommendation but
couldn’t quite get there. At that point,
a group of 19 House members sent a letter to the Governor, letting her know
that they would not support a package that included the repeal of Clean Fuels. (For
the record, some of us senators were prepared to make a similar
statement.) With that, things
precipitated, and a recommendation quickly emerged from the group (though in
the end, not everyone in the group agreed with everything in it).
You
can see an overview of the initial Clean Fuels replacement and the
transportation proposal here:
Document 1
Document 2
We
were briefed on the highlights of the plan late last week. The details are still being worked out as I
write. We should expect to see hearings
on the proposal by the end of this week. At this point, what’s most important to me is
that we have a clear understanding of the plan and the ability to have it fully
vetted and debated. To be honest,
though, it’s going to be tough to do that with so few days left in this
session. And it’s going to be tough for
me to support it, given what I’ve seen of it so far.
This
is very much a story in progress, so stay tuned.
First, we’ll start
at the Lents International
Farmers Market. Check out the local vendors, and pick up some berries for
snacking. The unique variety of food at the Market represents the community in
Senate District 23 like no other farmer’s market! We are excited to fill our bellies with local
fruits and veggies! Are you?
Second, we’ll head to the Lents Town Center, a business district for shopping, dining and
exploring on foot! This area is joined together by Foster, Woodstock, 92nd
avenue and I-205.
Next up are the Belmont
goats. These kids (get it?) were moved from “the goat blocks” on SE Belmont
and 11th. You may have passed them by in your car, or stopped to
give them a treat. Now they live on 91st and Foster, where they
graze like there’s no tomorrow! Check out the goats’ personalities before you
meet them on Sunday, here or watch a video about them
here.
Are you ‘Lents Grown’? We’ll stop by Lent Elementary to learn about alternate forms of transportation to
get around the neighborhood, including the Neighborhood Greenways, Safe Routes
to School, and the Lents Green Ring Project! These projects are meant to
encourage biking and walking through signage and community outreach.
Then we’ll visit 104th and Yukon, where the city
completed work on the Foster Floodplain project
in 2012. This project was designed to mitigate risk of flooding on Foster road,
and created a natural area for habitats and the community to access.
The Green Lents project has produced some really great community
programs, including the Malden Court
community orchard which is maintained by community members invested in
developing the land, sharing the yield, building relationships, and creating
learning experiences.
Next up, we’ll visit two different intersections to check
out some Intersection Repair Projects. The
first, at 85th and Knapp, will show us a project that was completed
in 2013. Then we’ll ride over to 86th and Glenwood to see the
painting in action! Check out the City
Repair’s website to learn more about how to get involved in these creative
and beautiful community building projects!
The NAYA Generations
Project is our next stop. The Generations Project is a part of the larger
NAYA organization, which provides a wide range of human services to the Native
American community in the metro area. This site, which used to be the Foster
Elementary School, is a housing development with subsidized units for seniors,
low income families and foster parents.
Our last stop is the Portland
Mercado! This is the first Latino market in Portland, with food carts,
businesses, art and culture! The Mercado provides affordable retail space for
new businesses to grow and thrive, while also bringing cultural diversity to
the neighborhood.
See
you in the district!
 Senator Michael Dembrow
District 23
email: Sen.MichaelDembrow@state.or.us
web: www.senatordembrow.com
phone: 503-281-0608
mail: 900 Court St NE, S-407, Salem, OR, 97301
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