January 3, 2024

Dear Neighbors and Friends,

I hope that you and your loved ones are doing well, staying healthy, and were able to enjoy a restful, renewing holiday season.  I hope you ended 2023 without too many regrets and are already contemplating good plans and hopes for the year to come.

I must admit that for me it feels strange to look ahead and realize that this year will mark the end of my time serving as an Oregon state legislator (and writing this darn newsletter!).  It's been a tremendous experience, and at some point I know I'll want to take the time to look back, to dwell on  the wonderful memories and the accomplishments, and yes the frustrations and regrets—but for now I’m focused on the upcoming legislative session: my sixteenth and last.

In tonight’s newsletter you’ll find information about next week’s Legislative Days, the final prep for the February session.  Then some info about the upcoming session itself, my priority bills, the work being done by the Task Force on Statewide Salary Schedules, the latest info for those who need unemployment insurance support, some interesting links, and details about our upcoming constituent coffee and town hall.

And then at the very end some troubling, late-breaking news about the Portland Mercado.

If you have any questions or reactions to anything in tonight’s newsletter, please do reach out and let me know.  And until next time, do take care and help get this 2024 off to a great start.

Next (Zoom) Constituent Coffee This Coming Saturday!

This coming Saturday, January 6, is the first Saturday in January (and in 2024!), and that means time for another constituent coffee.

This being an odd-numbered month, it will be all-Zoom this time.

It will again run 9 a.m. to 10:30 (or so . . .).

You can register for the zoom here.

This will be an opportunity for me to catch you up on the latest news from the Legislature, including my expectations for next week’s round of Legislative Days (see below).  I’ll also try to give you a sense of the ongoing issues that are out there as we prepare for the short session that begins next month, hear your priorities, and answer any questions that you might have.

Hope to see you there!

And in a Few Weeks:  SD23/HD45/HD46 Joint Zoom Town Hall

Reps Pham and Tran and I will be holding a brief pre-session town hall just a few days before the start of the February session. This will be an opportunity for us to discuss our priority personal and committee bills, give you our sense of what to expect from the House and the Senate, answer your questions, and hear your priorities. 

It will be by zoom on Thursday evening, Feb. 1.  You’ll need to register for it, so RSVP here!

Hope to see you there!

Coming Next Week: January Legislative Days

The final round of pre-session committee meetings will be held Wednesday, January 10, through Friday, January 12, 2024. Here's the schedule for these meetings.

We hold these committee hearings every few months during the “Interim” period between legislative sessions.  This is a special one because it comes just before the short legislative session that begins in February. 

You can expect most of the hearings to be devoted to the bills that will be introduced in the session that begins on February 5.  All Committee Bills need to be approved for submission by a majority of the committee this week (each committee gets three), so it will give us all a first chance to see the initial drafts of those bills.  Information sessions related to these committee bills, along with some of the personal bills that members have requested for drafting (each member gets two) will dominate the hearings. Once the session itself begins, the bills will have their public hearings, and the public will get to weigh in (once again either in person at the Capitol, remotely via zoom, or in writing). 

During Leg Days the Senate usually meets in floor session in order to vote on the Governor’s appointments to boards, commissions, and executive officer positions.  This time, because of the proximity to the February session, there will NOT be a floor session.  The most recent appointments will have their confirmation hearings and votes in February.

Committees are starting to post their agendas now.  You can find them by going to olis.oregonlegislature.gov, clicking on Committees, going to the desired committee and the meeting date.

Here’s a link to the Senate Education agenda.

Over the coming week you’ll also see the actual committee bills being posted on the Agenda page under Meeting Materials.

One of the Senate Education Committee Bills is LC 222.  (LC stands for “Legislative Concept.” Once the Committee votes to introduce the LC, it will receive its actual bill number, based on the order of introduction.)  LC 222 will provide temporary retroactive access to the community college Oregon Promise scholarship program for students in the “High School COVID Cohort” graduating classes of 2020 and 2021.  You can read about the bill and its purpose in this Oregonian article by Sami Edge.

Ways and Means, our joint budget committee, will also be meeting next week, along with its various subcommittees.  They will be considering a number of budget recommendations in advance of the February session, mainly standing budget items and items included in budget notes from last session.

Here’s the link to the agenda for the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Natural Resources, which I co-chair.

And here’s the link to the Ways and Means  Subcommittee on Education agenda. 

And finally here’s the link to the full Ways and Means agenda.

More on the 2024 Session (and the Joint Committee on Addiction)

While the Oregon Legislature meets for five months during odd-numbered years, during even-numbered years we have a “short session” lasting five WEEKS.  This year the constitutionally-set calendar will go from Monday, February 5, through Sunday, March 12 (though it can and often does end a little sooner).

The committee assignments for the 2024 session have just been released.  Here are the Senate's. And here are the House's.

Committee assignments are generally the same in this second year of the biennium as they were in the first, though there are some changes.  Most notably, we have the new Joint Committee on Addiction and Community Safety Response, charged with examining potential changes to Measure 110, which has been meeting since early fall.  It is empowered to craft and draft legislation during the session and send it on to the floors.  Its work will be a real focus of interest next month.  By the way, here’s a link to the agenda for their meeting during next week’s Leg Days.  They’ll be hearing a number of reports and recommendations and voting to introduce any committee bills (probably non-specific “placeholders” at this point.)

And here’s a press release on the upcoming meeting from Joint Committee Co-Chair Rep Jason Kropf that just came out today.

My Two Personal Bills

As I mentioned above, each legislator is limited to two bill requests during the short session.  Given the short amount of time that we have available to get bills introduced, scheduled, heard, debated, and voted on (and then it has to happen all over again in the other Chamber), this kind of limitation is inevitably (and frustratingly) needed. 

Short-session personal bills tend to be relatively modest in scope—often they’re repeats of bills that have been heard extensively in the previous long session but didn’t quite make it over the finish line, or they’re corrections/expansions of bills that did make it, or they’re creating task forces or studies for future work. 

The first of my two personal bills is LC 173. As you may remember, we passed a big Climate Action omnibus bill last year, HB 3409.  It combined a number of bills related to climate action and climate investments that had already passed out of committee and were in Ways and Means.  One of them was one of my priorities, SB 1522.  It took a number of steps to modernize our Oregon Global Warming Commission—changing its name to the Oregon Climate Action Commission, giving it the staff that it has never had, and making some other changes.  It was also intended to update our greenhouse gas emissions-reduction goals, bringing them in line with the best available science.  Unfortunately, at the last minute, that part of the bill had to be cut out because of disagreements over the wording.  At the time, I agreed to that but pledged to try to work things out and bring it back in 2024.  That’s what LC 173 does, and I’m looking forward to getting it into statute.

My second personal bill is LC 287.  It’s an updated version of SB 520 from last session, making it possible for infirm adults in custody to obtain early release to end their lives in an appropriate care setting.  Every state, including Oregon, has a process for what’s called “compassionate medical release.” Oregon’s is broken, and almost no one is able to get through it before death arrives first—even when the sentences that put them in prison are not life sentences. This modernized process is reserved for those who are close to death or who can no longer perform the activities of daily living without continual and extensive assistance and support. Our prisons are not set up to care for them.  They belong in another setting, one which incidentally would be paid for through Medicare and/or Medicaid, whereas currently their extremely expensive care comes out of the Oregon Corrections budget, where it could be better used.  I hope that you (and of course my colleagues!) will agree that it’s time for a change.  The federal corrections system made these kinds of changes during the Trump administration.  It’s time for Oregon to do the same.

Legislators are just now starting to get their drafts back from Legislative Counsel (still waiting for LC 287 to arrive). The deadline for getting Co-Chief Sponsors and Co-Sponsors and submitting LCs to the Secretary of the Senate or the Chief Clerk of the House is January 12^th, a week from Friday.  So, as you can imagine, we’ll be spending a lot of time this week and during Leg Days next week explaining our concepts to our colleagues and getting signatures from Chief Sponsors and Co-Sponsors. It’s a stressful but actually fun part of the process.

Of course, I’d love your support on both of these, my last personal bills.

Task Force on Statewide Educator Salaries Issues Preliminary Report

One of the task forces that I’m chairing or co-chairing during the Interim is one that is looking at making various improvements to educator salaries in this state. It was created as part of the legislative effort to address the shortages that we’re seeing in people going into and staying in the education field, whether as licensed teachers or as various support personnel. This led to SB 283,  which passed in June.

The task force was charged with looking into several things: potentially creating a floor for educator salaries, a statewide salary schedule, a way to pay student teachers for their work, and potentially providing extra compensation for those working in Special Education.  We also will be looking at whether it makes sense to have educator compensation negotiated at the state level.  Here’s a link to the Task Force's website,  where you can find all the materials submitted so far and links to meeting recordings.

We’ve been meeting regularly since September and are expected to come up with recommendations by next fall.  First, though, we needed to produce an interim report by the end of December, and that was finalized at our last meeting. You can read it here. It is essentially a recap of the process to date.

We are asking the public to read the report, consider the work that we’ve done so far, and give us feedback and suggestions at our next scheduled meeting on January 31.  The input can come in the form of online testimony, written testimony, or both. Here's a link to the agenda for that meeting, with information about how to testify.

At our last meeting we received a really interesting preview of work that Oregon’s Longitudinal Data Collaborative is doing for us on Oregon’s Educator Supply and Demand, examining where our compensation stacks up nationally and regionally, the numbers of teachers coming to us from Oregon’s schools of education vs. from other schools, and many other trends.  Here are five of their early findings:

1. Nationally, Oregon average teacher salaries and new teacher salaries are competitive.
2. New Oregon teacher salaries are not competitive with regional states.
3. New teachers in a third of Oregon counties could not qualify to rent a below-average 2-bedroom apartment based on their salaries.
4. Oregon’s Educator Preparation Programs (EPPs) are not producing as many graduates per capita as national benchmarks.
5. Oregon has a shortage of teachers across all levels of K-12 compared to national benchmarks, and regional states.

This is interesting, important work.  Stay tuned for more, and please consider giving us your thoughts on January 31.

On the Unemployment Insurance Front

Emory Mort from my office has been spending a lot of time lately helping constituents with their unemployment claims. It’s an important service that we provide. I really appreciate the work that Emory has been doing on their behalf, and I know they do too.

It’s not that unemployment is up (I’m happy to report that our rates continue to remain low); it’s that the federal funds that support the work have declined, and as a result staff numbers are down.  Fortunately, a new tech system should be coming on board very soon, and that should help.

As is happening in other states right now, OED is also dealing with some sophisticated fraud efforts (which are also hitting the new Family Medical Leave program), which are delaying the process for some. 

If you find yourself waiting more than a few weeks for your claim to be processed, go ahead and write to us about it.  Include the last 4 digits of your Social Security Number, address, and phone number.  We can then check with the Employment Department. It won’t move you to the front of the line but it will help OED verify that your application has been received and is in line to be considered.

Here's an updated advice sheet that legislators received last month from the Department.  Please share with anyone who might need it.

Additional Links of Interest, Including the Latest on COVID

• At year’s end, here's what we know about Long COVID at this point, from the Washington Post. 
• With the end of the declared COVID national and state emergency, we no longer get the kind of regular information from the CDC and the OHA that we used to. Still, if you’re interested in staying on top of trends as best you can, here’s a link to a good CDC resource that will allow you to track the number of hospital admissions and deaths in your county. These metrics remain the best and most reliable ways to gauge the seriousness of illness in your area. Though we’re seeing a seasonal increase in respiratory illness here, and they definitely need to be taken seriously, the rate of serious illness is fortunately far, far below what it once was, and remains less than in other parts of the country.
• And here’s a state-by-state-level view.
• The New York Times has a good tracker as well, though you may need to be a subscriber.
• On another subject OPB’s Elizabeth Miller has an interesting story on what employers and colleges are looking for in high school graduates.  You may be surprised at some of these.  
• From the environmental news source Carbon Brief, here's a deep dive into what was agreed upon (and not) at the recent COP 28 climate summit in Dubai. 
• You’ll remember the controversy around location of extremely large chicken farms (technically a form of CAFOs, Confined Animal Feeding Operations) that helped lead to the successful passage of SB 85, one of my priority bills last year. In December we learned that Linn County has followed up on the new authority we gave them in SB 85 (2023) to prevent new operations from being located right next to schools or people’s homes. Here’s reporting from the Capital Chronicle.

Late-Breaking Sad News

We just learned today that the Portland Mercado in Southeast Portland suffered a serious fire overnight.  The Mercado is a much-loved incubator and hub for Latino-owned food businesses.  It’s where we started and ended our most recent Bike Town Hall this year, and it’s been a tremendous community-building resource. 

As you’ll see in this article in this evening's Oregonian, the owner of the facility, Hacienda CDC, and the business owners, have vowed to rebuild, but they’re going to need some help.  I just sent them a small contribution, and I hope you can as well.  Here’s a link to the donation website.

The good news is that no one appears to have been hurt, and this is a relatively slow time of year for their businesses.  Let’s help get them back on their feet.

Best,

Senator Michael Dembrow
District 23

email: Sen.MichaelDembrow@oregonlegislature.gov
web: www.senatordembrow.com
mail: 900 Court St NE, S-407, Salem, OR, 97301