SALEM, Ore. — With the bulk of their legislative work just days away from beginning, lawmakers in Salem have big ambitions in mind that will have to fit in the space of a short session.
Mark Twain is quoted as saying, "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session." The people now getting ready at the state capitol might take offense at that statement, but there are certainly many Oregonians who believe Twain is correct.
The 2024 session will be 35 days long, which is why it's referred to as a "short" session. Oregon alternates yearly between short and long sessions, and the latter are 160 days long.
While lawmakers craft and pass their budgets during the long session, short sessions are for moving money around during a two-year budget cycle that it already underway — and just enough time to make a few tweaks to existing laws. There's rarely time for a broad suite of legislation. Instead, lawmakers have staked out a handful of topics that they intend to target over the next few weeks.
Drug policy and addiction
Lawmakers have made clear that one thing they'll be addressing is Measure 110, Oregon's first-in-the-nation drug decriminalization law, passed by voters in 2020.
Earlier this week, leaders from both parties talked about Measure 110 and the changes they hope to make. While there are details left to be ironed out, it's increasingly clear that drugs will be re-criminalized in Oregon to one extent or another. That piece of the Measure 110 experiment is a failure, as far as political leaders are concerned.
"When it comes to our addiction crisis that is impacting every community — rural Oregonians as well as people in Portland ... we are really working on making sure that we have a comprehensive plan that can address this issue urgently," said House Speaker Dan Rayfield, a Democrat. "And that includes things like making sure that people have the right supports at the right times so that they can move through their own path to recovery. Additionally, we need to make sure that law enforcement has the tools they need to be able to confiscate hard drugs like meth and fentanyl."
House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich agrees on the broad strokes, if not on the specifics.
"I think it is the biggest crisis that we're facing right now. We have more people dying on the street ... open-air drug markets," Helfrich said. "We need to get to a solution. We've talked about the task force that's there — we're not there. We have a starting point. We had a bill that we presented. They have their framework ... Somewhere in the middle, we'll get there. We have to have accountability through the criminal justice system, but we also have to have that compassionate care — and I believe those are the two things that are going to drive the conversation for Measure 110. Early and often intervention, I think, is the key to the success of Measure 110 and what that looks like."
House Majority Leader Julie Fahey, another Democrat, echoed that lawmakers have some ideas of what to do with Measure 110, but the end product will be shaped through the legislative process that begins next week.
"From my perspective, we haven't started the session yet, so we haven't started the process of getting public testimony, public input on the package ... the committee has worked for many months and has heard from experts and other people in the field of addiction and law enforcement and other perspectives. But the public input is really important to this," Fahey said. "I'm sure we're all getting emails or phone calls from our constituents about the proposal, and I'm really interested to engage in those conversations.
"I had an e-mail that we drafted a response to this week from a person, a constituent who's a Democrat who says this proposal isn't tough enough. And I said, 'OK, let's engage. What would you like to see? Why do you want it to be a Class A misdemeanor, on par with things like strangulation and stalking? Why? What level of misdemeanor would you like to see and why?' So I think that for me, that's the piece that hasn't yet happened. It's starting to happen now that we've rolled out the package and the public is starting to contact us individually as legislators, but that conversation also needs to happen in public."
The plans put forth by Democrats and Republicans thus far have some overlap, but differ dramatically in other aspects. Democrats proposed making simple drug possession a Class C misdemeanor, which is the lowest version of misdemeanor under Oregon law. Republicans want simple drug possession to be a Class A misdemeanor, the highest crime just below a felony. But both parties seem committed to building in offramps for treatment instead of jail.
It's also possible that lawmakers will pass a law making it illegal to use drugs in public. Right now, local ordinances can ban drinking alcohol on a public sidewalk, for instance, but can't do the same for drug use — a quirk of existing laws on the books that predated decriminalization. Republicans included criminalization of public drug use in their proposal, but it's possible that Democrats will get on board with such a law as well.
Housing development
The other primary issue that lawmakers are likely to tackle is housing and land use laws. Gov. Tina Kotek has requested $500 million for a variety of projects under that umbrella, but one of the more controversial plans would allow cities in some circumstances to move their urban growth boundaries in order to build more housing.
In the Oregon Senate, there is again agreement about the importance of the issue, but it remains to be seen what lawmakers will be willing to agree on, particularly where the urban growth boundary is concerned.
"We think one of the most important elements of a significant package is infrastructure dollars and also bringing in new lands to you," said Senate Republican Leader Tim Knopp. "But you have to do something different if you're going to make change, and the governor set out an aggressive goal of 36,000 housing units a year statewide — we're currently doing about 18 to 20,000, so it's almost doubling of what the production is currently for housing. In order to do that, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, or a better result, and so, land is part of that."
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Knopp said that he's worked with builders on all types of housing and developments over the last 20 years, and he's intimately familiar with the time it takes to get from start to finish — a 3- to 5-year process, he said, if everything goes smoothly.
"And so you have to speed up that timeline if you're going to make an impact on housing production — because if we don't, we keep doing the same thing we've been doing and we don't do the things that are necessary," he added. "We're not going to reach that goal until after Gov. Kotek's first term. I would like to start reaching that goal by at least getting on-pace to reach that goal by next year."
Senate President Rob Wagner, a Democrat, credited Gov. Kotek for her persistence on the housing issue, which has helped stimulate conversation in the legislature on what can be done, even if she can't win over lawmakers on land use changes.
"She's been laser-focused, and she really does have her finger on the pulse of what Oregonians are caring about," Wagner said. "Sen. Knopp just said, even just from polling and things that we've seen, housing, housing, housing is what we hear from our constituents — and it's really where we need to be putting our attention. She did really good work ... trying to bring different stakeholders together, and her bill is going to receive a public hearing in front of the Senate Housing Committee this week — not just around the conversation around land use and land-use exemptions.
"There is a lot to like in terms of the Housing Production Office, looking at streamlined permitting, looking at the investments that are going to be bipartisan around shovel-ready land," Wagner continued. "A lot of that conversation has been happening looking at some innovative tools and strategies."
The last time Gov. Kotek took a similar proposal before the legislature, Democratic lawmakers played a key role in shooting it down.