January 13, 2024

Dear Neighbors and Friends,

I hope that you and your loved ones are managing to stay healthy and warm on this unusually, incredibly (for us) frigid day.

Today’s newsletter is designed mainly to let you put some upcoming meetings on your calendar and to catch you up on the Oregon Legislature’s “Leg Days” that just finished up yesterday.  I’m focusing today on the bills coming out of the Senate Education Committee and my own personal bills.  Needless to say, if you have the time to delve into the different committee hearings from this past week, you’ll not only find the text of all the committee bills we’re anticipating for the upcoming session, but also some very interesting presentations, reports, and discussion.  Just go to olis.oregonlegislature.gov, click on Committees, and pursue your interests.

If you have any questions or reactions to anything in today’s newsletter, or anything else related to our wok please do reach out and let me know. 

And finally, as we approach this year’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day, let’s all remember Dr. King’s commitment, dedication, and important work, and seek to incorporate into our own lives his call to moral action in “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.  

Interfaith Legislative Forum at the End of January

The good people at the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon will again be holding a pre-session legislative forum.  It will again be via zoom, and I’ll be one of the legislators sharing info and answering questions.  It’s always a great way to kick off the upcoming session. 

This one will be on Sunday, January 28, 1:30-3:30 p.m.  Here’s info about it and a sign-up link from the EMO website:

Would you like to hear from Oregon’s Senators and Representatives about session priorities? Do you want to know how to be most effective in your advocacy efforts?

The Interfaith Legislative Forum will provide an overview of legislative issues of concern to the faith community, with legislators informing the audience of the issues facing the legislature in the coming session.

The forum is free. You can register at https://emoregon.org/event/forum/

 You will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting via Zoom. We will also provide an update to those who have registered when we have confirmation of speakers.

Coming Up: 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.  You’ll need to register for it, so RSVP here!

Hope to see you there!

The Senate Education Committee Introduces Its Three Committee Bills for 2024

I can report with relief that the first round of 2024 Leg Days went without much of a hitch this past week.  Again, this was an opportunity for legislators to come to Salem, meet in person in their committees, joint committees, and task forces.  It was also an opportunity for constituents and advocates to come to the Capitol to meet with legislators, and make their case for needed policy changes and budget investments.  Actually, there was one little hitch—the Friday afternoon meetings were moved to a remote format (we use Microsoft Teams) because of concerns over weather, particularly for legislators with long drives ahead of them.

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, most of the committee hearings focused on the committee bills that will be introduced in the session that begins on February 5.  All committee bills (each committee gets three), needed to be approved for submission by a majority of the committee during the meeting. It’s generally a pro forma vote: members are not necessarily voting in support of the contents of the bills, just voting to allow them to begin their session journey.  Once the session actually begins, they’ll have their public hearings and votes. 

The great thing is that we can now see all the committee bills that will be in play for the 2024 session.  You can find them by going to olis.oregonlegislature.gov, clicking on Committees, going to the desired committee and the meeting date, then clicking on Meeting Materials.

We in the Senate Education Committee introduced our three bills on Thursday. Here’s a link to the Senate Education page for January 11. Senate Education page for January 11.

Our three LCs are LC 219  LC 220, LC 220,  and LC 222.

LC 219, which has now been assigned its session bill number, SB 1552, is our “omnibus education bill” for the short session.  It’s typical during the short session for Senate Education to introduce a multi-section omnibus bill that makes a number of technical fixes and further work on bills that were passed or attempted during the last long session. This year’s covers fifteen topics, some very minor, others very interesting and timely, including an important step to potentially revise Oregon’s approach to education funding.  Here’s my explanatory summary of the bill.

LC 220, which has now been assigned its session bill number, SB 1550, proposes to merge the Teachers Standards and Practices Commission staff into the Oregon Department of Education.  It would retain the TSPC commission as the decision-making board for teacher licensing and disciplinary investigations/decisions but would move their staff into ODE for greater efficiency and better coordination.  Oregon is rare in having this staff work split out over multiple agencies.  I believe that bringing this work under the same umbrella will enhance our efforts to recruit, retain, and professionally develop our teachers and other educators.  More on this to come.

LC 222, which has now been assigned its session bill number, SB 1551, will provide temporary extended 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.

Finally, here’s the Education Committee staff summary for all three bills. 

You’ll be hearing more about them as the session begins.  Now that the bills have been introduced, we start the process of looking at any necessary amendments if needed to keep their costs down or to work out any problems or potential disagreements that arise.  Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions about any of them.

Filing Personal Bills

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, we had more going on this past week than Leg Days and the submission of committee bills.  Legislative Counsel also had to return bill drafts (Legislative Concepts, or LCs) of the two personal bills allowed each legislator.

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 was Friday.  So, as you can imagine, we spent a lot of time this week explaining our concepts to our colleagues and getting signatures from Chief Sponsors and Co-Sponsors. At the same time, we had to decide which bills we wanted to be aligned with as Chief or Co-Sponsors.  Lots of research and conversations were required, either in person or via phone, email, or text.

Chief sponsors and Co-Sponsors can be from either chamber.  That is, House members can sign onto Senate bills, and Senators can sign onto House bills.  After the bills and signature sheets are filed with the Secretary or Chief Clerk, additional senators can sign onto Senate bills up until they’re voted on the Senate floor, but additional House members cannot—until the bill moves over to the House.  Similarly, additional senators cannot sign onto a House bill until the bill has moved over to the Senate.  Thus, if the bill never successfully makes it out of the “chamber of origin,” additional members from the other chamber will never be able to sign on and show they were in support.

And let me clarify that just because a member hasn’t signed onto a bill, that doesn’t mean they don’t support it.  It may have just been a question of timing and logistics.

Prior to COVID, the resulting signatures needed to be gathered and submitted in person.  But this is another area in which COVID taught us that we can actually do a lot of this work remotely, so now this can be done in a hybrid manner—via a combination of e-signatures and physical signatures.  Having that option actually removes some of the stress and makes for a better product.

Once the bill is filed, we’re notified of its actual bill number.  Bill numbers are assigned in the order that they are filed. 

I’m told that the plan is to get personal bills uploaded onto the Oregon Legislative Information System (OLIS) the week of January 22.  As I mentioned, committee bills can already be found on the webpage for their committee hearing this past week.

My Two Personal Bills Now Have Numbers

I’m happy to report that I DID get my two bills submitted on Friday (Thanks Emory!).  Here are their numbers:

SB 1559: Updated Emissions Reductions Goals (was LC 173)

SB 1560: Compassionate Medical Release (was LC 287)

And here again is my description of the two bills from my last newsletter.

The first of my two personal bills is LC 173. [now SB 1559] 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 [SB 1559] does, and I’m looking forward to getting it into statute.

[Here’s a "one-pager" description of the bill.]

My second personal bill is LC 287 [now SB 1560].  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. 

[Here’s a one-pager for SB 520 from last year.]  from last year.]

Reminder:  The Task Force on Statewide Educator Salaries Is Seeking Input

In the last newsletter I discussed the taskforce that is looking at making various improvements to educator salaries in this state. 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.

The Task Force recently released an interim report,essentially a recap of the process to date. You can read it here. 

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.

Best wishes always,

Senator Michael Dembrow
District 23

email: Sen.MichaelDembrow@oregonlegislature.gov
web: www.senatordembrow.com
phone: 503-281-0608
mail: 900 Court St NE, S-407, Salem, OR, 97301