 * “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
—Helen Keller
 Legislators pour onto the Senate Floor to celebrate adjournment, 3/4/2022
This end-of-session newsletter will be a little different from some. I’ll spend most of it on just a couple of bills and moments that moved me. They reflect a very small fraction of the ground covered in what may have been the most packed and productive short session ever. Here is a longer list of important bills that became law.
Feel free to contact me at sen.jeffgolden@oregonlegislature.gov if you
want to know more about any of them.
 Photo of the Elliott State Forest taken by ODF
If Oregon history books include anything we did this session, my bet is it will be the pair of forest agreements that industry, landowning and environmental leaders forged over more than a year of negotiations. Both passed through my Natural Resources Committee on their way to the Senate and House Floors, giving me the privilege of publicly setting a context that might have been overlooked as we rushed to the end of the session.
The higher-profile of the two was SB 1501, the historic Private Forest Accord. A fast droning computer voice read the 44-page bill for more than 90 minutes before I could open debate, so I threw out a long explanatory speech in favor of this briefer carry, a choice my colleagues didn’t mind at all.
SB 1546 settled a narrower, though not much less contentious, conflict. It took years to strike a balance for stewardship of the Elliott, Oregon’s premier state forest, but a similar cross-section of stakeholders did it. Here are my thoughts from the Senate floor.
 [written last Thursday morning]
I begin writing this section on the Senate floor as debate begins on SB 4002, which would end the exclusion of agricultural workers from laws that require employers to pay overtime after they work a certain number of hours. This is this session’s 800 pound gorilla.
Right now I’m listening to Republican motions to send the bill, in the session’s waning hours, to different committees. After half an hour of their pleas to send it to the Rules Committee for more discussion, we voted no on a straight party-line vote. The next motion was to send it to the Revenue and Finance Committee, another opportunity for Republicans to rise one by one to blast the bill. That motion will also go down on a party-line vote. After that I expect they’ll move to send it to the Ways and Means Committee, followed by another few speeches trashing the bill, followed by another party-line NO vote. This will probably take up the rest of the morning, pushing full debate and a vote on the bill itself into the afternoon. (Here it is, the vote on moving the bill to Revenue and Finance: 18 Nay, all Democrats, 9 Yeas, all Republicans).
The rationale given for all these motions is that we haven’t given this important bill the amount of discussion and consideration it needs; we don’t understand the complexities and unintended consequences wrapped up in all this. If we did, and if we talked more, surely we’d fine a more amicable and bipartisan solution—maybe, in a phrase that’s gained traction this session, we could have an “Oregon victory” rather than a “Democrat win.”
If I thought that could happen, I’d stay for more conversation all day and night—several days and nights, however long it took—because we’re starving in this state for consensus victories. But I don’t think that anyone paying attention believes that more discussion could get us there. Through various legislative sessions over the years, and through a series of long committee meetings this session that included testimony from hundreds of citizens, lawmakers have struggled long and hard with this issue. In the end we’re still left with a core conflict between two values: the justice of extending basic economic rights to a sector of workers—truly essential workers, for those of us who need to eat—who’ve been excluded until now, set against the viability of family-scale agriculture in Oregon, which already struggles with serious economic challenges. Those rising to demand more discussion know that; without enough votes to defeat the bill, they want to send it to a quiet place to die.
Efforts to ease the conflict in this bill focused on a transitional glide path of public subsidy. The chart shows the six-year schedule of tax credits, more generous for those with fewer than 25 employees than those with more. At first, overtime will kick in after 55 hours in a week; that will taper down to 40 hours over time. Tax credits will cover 90% of extra overtime costs for small farms at first (60% for farms with over fifty workers), tapering down to 60% and 15% in 2028.
 Essentially we’re saying that for the next few years we taxpayers as a whole will take on some of the burden—think of it as a very small surcharge for some of the food we eat to give farmworkers what they deserve and farmers, to a point, what they need. Without this reconciling tool, votes for this bill would have fallen short.
But it’s temporary. What happens in 2028? Nobody knows, partly because the big dynamics of agriculture are changing so fast. But it’s unlikely that the fierce dilemma of this issue will disappear by then.
This is one of the hardest votes I’ll have to take. I’m not willing to support continued economic discrimination against people who work brutally hard to put food on our table—more so because of what they’ve endured through two years of COVID, suffocating smoke and lethal heat waves. I’m not willing to accept the failure of more family farms, and the further corporatization of agriculture, which is what this bill’s opponents tell us to expect. I worry that, after the glide path runs out, that could be right. And their claim that this will end up hurting workers as farmers avoid overtime by mechanizing more tasks and capping workweeks might have merit, too. Experts in committee hearings argued over those points, and the evidence in states that have embraced agriculture over time doesn’t point strongly in that direction. But if opponents’ predictions pan out, some tough repair work lies ahead.
But I don’t get to wait for years of data before I vote. In a few minutes the clerk will call out “Golden,” and I’ll say “Aye” or “No.” Either way I’ll be doing what many of you have asked for and rejecting the instruction of others.
After more than three hours, the last speaker is wrapping up. The Senate clerk starts calling the role…
………….
“Golden.”
“Aye.”
……….
Senate President: “Senate Bill 4002B, having received a constitutional majority, is declared passed.”
 So issue settled…for now. But the core dilemma this bill highlighted won’t go away. Some think it can’t be resolved. I agree — on the state level. But what if Congress redirected tens of billions of Federal Farm bill dollars from corporate ag coffers to family farms and local food networks? If there’s a path that gets us all three outcomes—community-based small farms, justly compensated workers and quality affordable food, that’s it.
I think Mail Tribune’s editorial got this right.
One moment earlier in the week was barely worth noting by itself. I include it as a good illustration of the ritual parliamentary dance you’ll see on legislative floor every election year.
On Tuesday a Republican Senator moved to withdraw a bill from the Rules Committee, where it was about to die along with many others at session’s end, to the Senate Floor for action. The motion died on a party-line vote, which always happens with this kind of motion; the majority party’s not going to hand the minority the prerogative to decide what does and doesn’t come to the floor, period.
In this case we were talking about SB 1537, which would strengthen requirements for “cost impact studies” on the effect proposed laws and rules would have on construction and thus housing costs. Fair idea, except…except you have to be careful and clear about what you’re measuring. Cost impact studies have a way of overcounting short-term quantifiable costs (e.g., the extra you might have to pay for fire-resistant materials in an extreme wildfire risk zone) and undercounting long-term, less quantifiable benefits (savings on insurance premiums, lower likelihood of losing your home and belongings, less flammable material out there to ignite or spread huge wildfires). By itself the standard “just tell me how much it’s gonna cost” approach won’t get you good policy.
So we weren’t willing to pass this bill without broad agreement on how costs and benefits would be factored in. We told the sponsor that and offered a work group to bring a clear bill back to the 2023 session. We didn’t hear back from him again…until his motion this morning to pull his original bill—the one we wouldn’t approve in committee—to the floor for a vote.
He didn’t expect to win this skirmish. His purpose was to tee up a talking point for his party in this year’s election: “Our bill would have simply let us know how a particular regulation affects construction costs. But the Democrats, the very ones crying all the time about homelessness and unaffordable rental rates, won’t even bring it to a vote. So you can’t believe a word they say.”
I’m not saying that only one party takes cheap shots. I am saying that it’s good to take claims about votes like this, stripped of their context, with a few grains of salt.
This was a good session for those of us who think our criminal justice system needs improvement. When your country has the world’s highest incarceration rate AND recidivism rate AND you still lead the world for many rates of violent crime, you know something’s not working.
SB 1510 aims to make things better in Oregon. It’s a broad package that invests in restorative justice and redesigns parole and probation to get people past criminal behavior. It also narrows the sideboards for traffic stops to reduce those tragic episodes that spin out of control. It’s that last part that triggered opposition from those who see no need for any curtailment of police practices at all.
That disagreement torpedoed a similar bill last session, HB 2002. A conversation with our county sheriff back then gave me serious concerns about that bill. He walked me through the way some of its provisions could play out on the streets and made a strong case that they’d undermine his public safety mission. I took that back to Salem (as other legislators who’d talked to their sheriffs and police chiefs probably did) and last year’s bill was dropped. A work group was launched with law enforcement at the table. The result was SB 1510, which we passed 16-11 in the Senate this week.
The revisions centered on distinguishing “primary offenses” (violations that could trigger a traffic stop) from “secondary offenses,” where a motorist could still be cited, but only if he or she were lawfully stopped for a primary offense. In the old bill, pretty much all equipment violations, including having both tail lights or headlights out, were secondary offenses, so police couldn’t pull over a car for that alone. Some moving violations like changing lanes without signaling were on that list, too, which especially bothered law enforcement.
The new bill makes all moving violations primary offenses, along with some equipment violations. Police won’t be able to stop cars with one working headlight or tail light (unless some primary offense is also occurring), but they can if both headlights or both tail lights are out. The biggest change was a provision allowing police to override those rules if they think the particular circumstances of the case—say, driving with one tail light out on an especially foggy night—was a threat to public safety. What if an officer says it was and a motorist says it wasn’t? A judge or jury takes over from there.
If you listen to floor debates this session, you may have heard Senators say “What I’m promoting here isn’t a perfect bill…has anyone seen one of those?” If so, it’s not this one. While the restorative justice investments and parole/probation reforms won broad support, the police practices section didn’t leave anyone wholly delighted. But to me the process was a good example of constructive compromise that yielded a good result.
I was not a big fan of some of the pandemic relief legislation that Congress passed in the last two years. Sending substantial checks to Americans who were relatively well off and buffered from COVID effects was a little hard to understand, unless we’ve decided budget deficits really don’t matter anymore. The funds could have been targeted better, and this session’s HB 4157 did that.
This bill authorizes one-time $600 payments for 240,000 of Oregon’s lowest-paid workers who stayed at their jobs through the first year of the pandemic. Our part of the state and eastern Oregon will feel the biggest effects, because a disproportionate number of our residents receive the Earned Income Tax Credit, which qualifies workers for this special payment.
The justifiable rush to get relief money out the door in the pandemic’s early days probably guaranteed that some of it wouldn’t be spent well. With some time to analyze and understand who shouldered essential work burdens in 2020, and who needs a boost now, HB 4157 meets an important need with precision and intelligence. Kudos to Representative Andrea Valderrama of Portland for bringing it forward.
OK. Short session 2022 is in the books. We’ll talk soon about what lies ahead. Best for now,
 Senator Jeff Golden, Oregon Senate District 3
 Schedules don't seem to be lining up for a Town Hall right after session ends. Stay tuned for an updated date.
Join expert presenters March 14th to learn more about student loans and discuss what public service workers need to know about the public student loan forgiveness (PSLF) limited waiver.
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