 * “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
Sarah and I send you all our best for a time of warmth, connection and gratitude as the year ends.
There’s been enough ‘Year in Review’ material in recent weeks that I’m fine saying goodbye to 2022 without further comment. How about a look ahead at 2023?
A long session of the Oregon legislation convenes January 9 to swear in members, adopt rules and elect a Senate President and House Speaker (almost certainly Sen. Rob Wagner and Rep. Dan Rayfield, respectively). Legislative business will begin in earnest the following week and run, as a traditional odd-year “long session,” through the end of June.
After two Covid-strapped years, the Capitol Building will be open to the public this session, with committee work coming off those “Hollywood Squares” screens and back into their customary meeting rooms to take public testimony and deliberate on bills.
This is a very good thing. Conducting the 2021 and 2022 sessions with the doors shut, notwithstanding how determined we were to stream all official proceedings and citizen testimony on Zoom-like platforms, was the best among our poor options. A small-d democratic energy flows when citizens are welcomed into the Capitol to observe and take part in our work, to tell us what’s on their minds both in formal testimony and off-the-cuff contact in the hallways. And in terms of public trust, the diminishing resource Oregon government sorely needs to function well, locking the Capitol doors was not at all helpful. While ongoing construction will continue to cramp things for another couple of years, I’m really glad we’re opening up again.
There’s at least one way the our Covid experience will open up the process. If you testified on any of our bills in the last two sessions, you did it from your home, office or some other place you chose, because you couldn’t get into a Capitol meeting room. The online testimony option will continue. Instead of driving almost four hours to Salem, struggling for a parking space, sitting in a crowded room waiting your turn, speaking for 2-3 minutes and then driving four hours back home, Jackson County folks will be able to fire up a computer or phone, click on a couple of links, and appear before the committee on a large screen. Will that make for much greater public engagement? I have to think so.
On Wednesday Senate President-Designate Wagner announced committee assignments for the session. I’ll retain the Chair of the Natural Resources/Wildfire Committee and take a seat on the Energy & Environment, Finance & Revenue and Joint Tax Expenditure Committees. I asked for the seat on Revenue because I think we’ve been avoiding the tough conversation of finding the resources we need to sustain the expanded role the state has recently taken on in housing/homelessness, mental health, education, wildfire protection, water resource improvement, child care, workforce development… that’s not even the whole list, but it’s enough to tell me we’re whistling past the graveyard when it comes to Oregon’s fiscal future.
The reason we’re not talking enough about this is because it’s hard to talk about. Most Oregonians feel like they’re struggling with all the tax burden they can handle already—more so as costs rise for just about everything they have to buy. Where, then, do we look to achieve a fairer and more balanced tax system? That question, alive in every state, is shining more and more light on the financial books of the biggest corporations in our lives—Amazon, Google, Meta, Walmart, Apple. Are their tax contributions to our communities in fair proportion to the wealth they pull out of them? If not, what do we do to establish a fair balance?
That’s the conversation that’s overdue, and legislative revenue committees are the right venues. It’s time.
Kaylee Domzalski / OPB
2023’s not shaping up as a session for massive new programs and ideas, because the ones we’ve been dealing with still fill our plates. We have to maintain the momentum on
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Housing/homelessness: Tina Kotek made this her top issue as Speaker of the House and will again as Governor. A suite of programs are underway to increase lower-barrier shelters, affordable apartments and homes, cooperatively owned residential parks, and subsidized and workforce home ownership. We’ll find out how adequately our unprecedented investment scales to this daunting crisis.
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Mental and public health: Nearly inseparable from the homelessness crisis, this challenge will continue to demand a lot of our imagination and our budget. Here’s a good overview of what we’re facing.
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Wildfire: SB 762 invested $200 million in fire suppression, prevention and community adaptation, by far the largest amount ever. We haven’t identified a funding source to continue the effort at the level we need. We have to—there’s no reason to believe that the climate trajectory for hotter, drier, windier summers is going to change. (This also speaks to the need to continue the hefty infrastructure investments we’ve made to use water more efficiently.) SB 509 will bring a new element to the mix, a statewide network of fire-ready neighborhoods where property owners can come together to reduce risk in their community and, we hope, qualify for favorable treatment from insurance companies.
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Education: The Student Success Act (2019) took a historic step in preparing our pre-K through 12 system for challenges to come, but we’ve done precious little to make community colleges and public universities, RCC and SOU included, more accessible for Oregonians wanting to build self-sufficient lives. If our system has no reliable portal to family wage jobs, our long-term goals to overcome houselessness, substance abuse and mental illness aren’t very realistic.
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Child care: The data’s clear that the child care shortage blocks too many Oregonians, mostly women, from developing stable careers. Last year we used one-time federal dollars to fortify the system. We’re going to have to find ways to sustain the effort.
You can see why we have to launch that difficult revenue conversation I was talking about. Some say we should do a more careful and efficient job of spending the tax dollars we have today. They’re right. But that’s simply not going to close the gap between the basic needs that have grown in our state, as they have just about everywhere, and our currently available tax dollars. We have hard choices ahead.
Game-changing legislation that challenges existing power almost always takes multiple sessions to become law. In collaboration with other legislators I’ll be chief sponsor on three bills this session that fit that category. They would
- Create a Public Bank of Oregon, modeled on the proven success of the Bank of North Dakota. More than a few have taken a run at this in the past—mine was in 2021. It’s time to highlight the long list of benefits a state bank could provide to homeowners, small business, cities and counties, college students needing loans and others. North Dakotans across the political spectrum, unimpressed by groundless warnings of “socialism,” seem to love their bank.
- End new investment of Oregon public dollars in companies and sectors with strong connection to fossil fuels, and set a reasonable timetable for divesting the holdings we already have. Here’s a summary of the bill that would add Oregon to the rapidly growing list of public, private, corporate and philanthropic institutions that agree that financing the expanded use of a product that is devastating the earth isn’t sensible or moral.
- Limit contributions to political campaigns, to follow up on the expectation voters created when they passed Measure 107 in 2020 by nearly a 4-1 margin. My SB 500 brings back a campaign finance proposal that, to be honest, hasn’t gathered a critical mass of support in past sessions. It’s based on my firm belief that to pass the smell test with Oregonians, our system has to 1) ban distractingly large checks from ANY person or entity, 2) make it fairly easy to “follow the money”, and (3) inherently favor no particular party or interest group. That’s what reform looks like. After years of patient waiting for political money to be limited, that’s the reform that Oregonians deserve.
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World Health Organization
Other bills I’ve submitted would
- Propose to re-direct a portion of the $3.7 Billion income tax kicker scheduled for next year to a permanent Wildfire Trust Fund, which could generate almost enough interest every year to pay for our wildfire prevention and response programs on a permanent basis. Are Oregonians willing to give up some of their kicker one time in return for reliable protection for decades? Not likely, some experienced Salem hands have told me. I think we should find out.
- Encourage community solar projects (like the solar array atop the Civic building on East Main in Ashland) so that homeowners who don’t have favorable solar sites can take part.
- Explore proposals to re-use our gray water (from kitchen, bathroom and laundry drains) for outdoor purposes.
- Open our even-year primary elections to all voters, with the top 4 or 5 vote-getters moving on to a general election that could be decided by Rank Choice Voting
- Allow HOAs to make certain decisions without 100% consent from all members.
- Change the public notice requirement for local governments in a way that recognizes the movement of newspapers from print to the Internet.
- Make some direct-to-customer sales easier for family farmers.
Want more details on any of these? Let us know at sen.jeffgolden@oregonlegislature.gov
When we sent out our last newsletter, a lot of uncertainty surrounded Measure 114, the gun safety measure narrowly approved by voters in November. The only sure thing was that the pieces weren’t in place to follow through on the measure’s instruction to put it into effect on December 8.
Lawsuits quickly followed. A federal judge allowed the measure’s regulations to take effect as planned, with only a 30-day delay in the requirement to obtain a permit to buy a gun. Shortly after that, a Harney County Circuit Court judge’s ruling temporarily blocked all provisions of the measure, and the Oregon Supreme Court declined to review his decision. The state recently argued that at least the background check component of the measure should be able to take effect while the other pieces of the measure go through the legal system. A ruling on that argument is expected any day. Measure 114 will continue to make its way through the courts, and we will keep you updated on what happens.
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You remember the Greater Idaho movement, right? It gathered steam the last couple of years as people in several eastern and southern Oregon counties approved advisory votes to leave our state for the redder, and, to them, more “American” state of Idaho. In this last election, yes votes from Wheeler and Morrow counties brought the total to eleven. But earlier in 2022, and closer to home, Josephine and Douglas County voters declined the offer to become Idahoans.
That led to some shrinkage in the proposed secession map, from this:
 to this:
 The downsized map drops southwestern Oregon and Bend—places where there are documented instances of people voting blue— from the proposal, along with the Northern California portion. So, Rogue Valley, unless there’s another big twist…we’re out.
All of this has been dramatic enough to consistently make the front pages. It’s not hard to understand. A majority of voters on the east side of the mountains, and more than a few who live closer to us, plainly don’t feel represented by Oregon state government as it is. And those maps that come out showing the results of most statewide elections, with the Portland Metro Area and Lane County’s dabs of blue against a mass of red everywhere else, is a literal red flag in their face. I could write all day long about the compromises we in the Democratic majority have made that should have eased the urban-rural divide, but that stark bi-color elections results map speaks loudly for itself.
How serious is this movement? Like the State of Jefferson, it looks more like an organized cry of frustration than a practical possibility. Moving the state line requires approval from the two state legislatures and the US Congress. Up until now all of those three outcomes have been hard to imagine. Is that still true?
I ask because of a letter in my mailbox this week that suggests some fresh strategic thinking. It’s addressed “Dear Democratic caucus member,” and a section says “The Greater Idaho movement is a proposing a win-win solution. It is good for western Oregon because:
- It would eliminate a massive drain on the Oregon state budget (we estimate it’s more than $569 per northwestern Oregon wage earner annually).
- It would reduce gridlock in the Legislature: Democrats would have the super-majority necessary to pass taxation bills. Republicans in the Oregon Legislature would no longer have the numbers to deny quorum by walking out or slow the Legislature by forcing bills to be read in full.
- It would allow western Oregon to get what it wants without interference from eastern Republicans. Eastern Oregon would no longer vote on statewide referendums or statewide candidates.”
(And there’s this at the very end: “We apologize if any supporters (or imposters) used crude language in an email.” Some have, actually, but that doesn't make them different from a minority of those who write in on other issues.)
If their letter was intended to loosen up my thinking a bit, it worked. It seems to me our survival going forward depends on more mental suppleness than in the past, a willingness to revisit from time to time much of what we’ve believed. OK, then, for starters: what’s your view on the Greater Idaho movement?
Andy Atkinson / Mail Tribune
Finally, to drop into holiday fellowship, how great is this? If you want to take part, this would be the place to do it. In 2023 it will continue to be true that we’re in this together. Happy New Year.
 Senator Jeff Golden, Oregon Senate District 3
Throughout the 2023 session we plan to send along any links to wildfire-related information—rules and guidelines, grants and other resources, opportunities to offer your comments on the record—as soon as we get them. The Office of the State Fire Marshall just updated its site to be more informative, here. Stay tuned for more.
Community Wildfire Risk Reduction Grant: A competitive opportunity open to local governments, including special districts, structural fire service agencies, and non-governmental organizations. Those eligible can apply for wildfire risk reduction projects, equipment, and staff to support local efforts.
Jackson County Citizen Alert: This system enables the agencies within Jackson County to provide you with critical information quickly in a variety of situations, including severe weather, missing persons and evacuations due to flood, hazardous material, or wildfire situations.
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