By State Representative Rob Nosse
As I explained last month, the submission deadline for this column means that I had to wait till this month to share my thoughts about the legislative session that ended in June.
Boy, am I glad I waited. I would have totally predicted that we would pass a transportation package. It would have been a Dewey defeats Truman moment. Significantly younger readers may need to Google that phrase.
I am pretty down about it, but also hopeful that the “special session,” which the Governor called at the end of July, will produce a transportation package that will provide our state the support needed. I am also pretty down about the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by the US Congress. That is likely a WHOLE other column in and of itself.
This was a session defined by tough trade-offs. We faced a tighter-than-expected budget after the May revenue forecast went down. There was/is pressure from every corner of the state for help on big-ticket needs. Meanwhile this is all happening under the cloud of national uncertainty. There are Medicaid cuts from Congress coming. President Trump’s executive actions on so many things, especially tariffs, are sending shock waves through local industries, not to mention what he is doing on immigration, which is just mean and disgusting.
In spite of all that, the Oregon Legislature did accomplish things.
We passed a solid Medicaid budget and continue to help pay for it with hospital provider taxes. We run such a good Medicaid program. I am so worried about what is in store in light of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
We passed the largest K-12 budget in state history, $11.4 billion—enough to keep teachers on the payroll, avoid shortening the school year and shore up operations against rising costs. I realize many of you wanted us to do more, but we just don’t have the money.
We strengthened our early literacy initiative, and we also set up a new accountability framework that will tie local performance goals to state oversight. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a bill across the finish line to lift the outdated cap on special education funding. Students who rely on those services will still be under-supported.
We started to take care of wildfires. After years of one-off emergency appropriations, we finally created Oregon’s first permanent funding stream for wildfire prevention and mitigation by way of a tax on oral nicotine products (like ZYN). It’s not intuitive, but it gets dedicated money flowing to this critical need.
We think we are finally on track to start fixing our criminal defense system so that there are lawyers available to defend people accused of crimes as we are constitutionally required to do.
On housing and homelessness, we delivered meaningful investments in shelters and residential treatment beds, and additional funding for affordable housing construction, though far short of what the Governor wanted. I wish we did not cut over $100 million in rental assistance and other eviction protection programs. Again, we just did not have the money to do all that we needed to do. We did pass bills to make it easier to build “middle” housing and condos, so maybe the private sector will take advantage of the change in regulation and help us out.
We passed SB 110, which authorizes $800 million in state bonds to build a baseball stadium. The bonds are paid for by taxing the players’ incomes, which is a creative way to finance a stadium while saving the state money. There’s no guarantee that Portland will attract a baseball team, but, if we do, we have a way to pay for the construction. A baseball team would go a long way toward revitalizing Portland’s reputation.
We also managed to keep pushing back on some of the most divisive national cultural fights. Attempts to ban transgender girls from girls’ sports teams died. Efforts to ease drone use by police didn’t pass. Oregon even moved ahead with protections against book bans and continued to hold the line on personal freedoms. Given what is going on nationally and in other states, that matters. We also put money toward helping immigrants without a legal status to be able to hire a lawyer to obtain a legal status.
Lastly, two bills I introduced that provided more funding for residential treatment facilities and behavioral health workforce enhancements made it across the finish line, investing over $70 million to continue digging us out of the deep hole we have for behavioral health services. Much like housing, there’s still much to do in terms of expanding access to behavioral health services. What we asked for at the beginning of session had to be scaled back by the end of session. I was lucky to land $70 million. This is my third time saying this: We did not have as much money as we needed to fund the needs we have.
So that’s some of the session’s accomplishments in broad strokes: some wins, some glaring misses and plenty of unfinished business.
Now we roll into the interim to regroup, reimagine and get ready to do it all again come February. Thanks for sticking with me through every newsletter, every cautiously optimistic update and every sigh about how hard this work can be. More reflections to come soon, particularly about transportation and Medicaid (and maybe even about some of my efforts in the legislature that did not make for big headlines but for sure helped to make a difference).
