Senator Jeff Kruse - April 26th, 2013

 

Senator Jeff Kruse
R-Roseburg, District 1

Phone: 503-986-1701    900 Court St. NE, S-211 Salem Oregon 97301
Email: sen.jeffkruse@state.or.us     Website: http://www.leg.state.or.us/kruse
E-Newsletter                 

 Working Hard For You

 

APRIL 26, 2013

I am still getting a lot of emails about the gun bills, and there is really not a lot known at this point in time. We do know the bills, if they are brought to the floor for a vote, will all fail. There are still some in the Democratic caucus who want us to take the vote. The potential target date might be next Wednesday, but nothing is certain at this point in time. My personal position is, bring them on. I would like to defeat these bills on the floor.

The most interesting development this week happened in the House. Speaker Kotek has been saying for some time she had the votes for her tax package. At the end of the day that wasn’t true. As a failsafe measure the Republicans in the House had offered an alternative in the form of a minority report. While the original bill called for around 260 million in additional revenue including taxes and other adjustments, the minority report called for around 18 million in enhanced collections. When the Speaker finally realized she didn’t have the votes for her tax plan she chose to accept the minority report and it ended up passing on a 60-0 vote. I think this was a face saving move by the Speaker so her bill wouldn’t die, but none of her original bill was left in the version passed by the House.

The House followed this with the passage of the PERS lite bill that had passed in the Senate a couple of weeks ago on a party line vote. As I stated earlier, this bill really does nothing to solve the real problem we have and actually makes it worse in the future.

So now the action switches to the Senate. We have been trying to work with the Senate Democrats in a bi-partisan manner to come up with some real solutions in the areas of revenue and PERS. So far they have only been willing to talk about revenue. We thought the House vote would trigger some action on PERS, but we were wrong. On the revenue issues we selected two of our members to meet with two of their members to work on the issues. They have been meeting for a couple of weeks. Additionally, we have selected two of our members to represent us in the PERS negotiations. It would stand to reason we should have the ability to select our members and we would never assume to dictate to the Democrats who their members should be. In this case, as of yesterday afternoon, we were told our members were not acceptable to them and they wouldn’t meet unless we made a change.

This is where we stand half way through the session. We selected the two members of our caucus who we think have the greatest level of knowledge and expertise in the area of PERS to represent us in the negotiations. To have them rejected by the majority party falls way short of the “bi-partisan solution” they say they want to find. The majority party in Salem can certainly talk the talk; it is time for them to walk the walk.

Sincerely,

Senator Jeff Kruse

 

 

If you are interested in reading my past newsletters please click on my webpage link below:

 

http://www.leg.state.or.us/kruse/

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