By State Representative Rob Nosse
The “short” legislative session ended March 6, a few days before our constitutional deadline. It’s April, and I’m still exhausted. We were darn busy. Five weeks is probably too short of an amount of time to tackle challenges with our state’s budget, tax structure and economy that were all caused by President Trump with the passage of HR1, the “one, big, beautiful bill,” along with all the immigration challenges also caused by President Trump.
We also had to tackle challenges with gun safety, funding for schools, the Moda Center, healthcare and transportation.
Being extremely busy means there are quite a few highlights. For starters, thanks to a better-than-expected revenue forecast, we did not have to make some of the cuts to programs and schools that were contemplated back in November and December as we were frantically getting ready for session.
I remember promising the parents of kids with disabilities that we would keep them eligible for the Oregon Health Plan regardless of their income and hoping we could keep that promise and we did. I also remember being nervous about telling parents that we would not dream of cutting school budgets. While we thankfully did not cut school funding, we also did not end up dipping into our education reserves and helping school districts across the state experiencing budget challenges (like PPS) for next year either. More on that in a different column.
In part, our budget challenges ended up not being as bad as we predicted because we were able to partially “disconnect” from the federal tax system and keep some of the state tax revenue that we might have otherwise lost to help shore up programs. We focused on eliminating tax breaks that lacked clear evidence for creating jobs, as well as deductions for auto loan interest, corporate equity sale profits and accelerated depreciation for select capital investments. We also made the largest expansion of the earned income tax credit in our state’s history.
We made sure insurance will cover your immunizations, and if the federal government continues to roll back vaccination protections, we can respond more quickly than we were able to last fall when the CDC and various advisory bodies backed away from making COVID boosters and flu shots readily available.
We also made sure Planned Parenthood remained fully funded by having the state step up to reimburse them for the care they provided to Medicaid patients. Since we cannot use federal Medicaid dollars anymore, we will just do it as a state and continue to make primary care and reproductive care available to our state’s residents via this important healthcare provider. We also protected providers of abortion care and gender affirming care here in Oregon from being targeted by regulatory bodies in other states.
We passed many immigration bills in response to the increased ICE activity we are seeing. (Hopefully most of you know that Oregon was the first state in the nation to pass a sanctuary law, where local law enforcement officials are not allowed to cooperate with ICE and assist with immigration enforcement).
We will require school districts and colleges to develop an alert system to notify students and parents when federal agents appear on school property. Hospitals will have to follow new state guidelines regarding ICE interactions in hospitals, including documenting agent visits, prohibiting agents from accessing nonpublic areas unless there’s a court order and preventing hospitals from retaliating against workers who provide a patient with information on their legal rights and available services.
We passed a bill that requires non-Oregon law enforcement operating in the state to follow identification requirements, warrant procedures and requirements when entering buildings during an operation. The bill also creates a civil cause of action against outside law enforcement if they don’t follow these regulations. We passed a law that requires all law enforcement agencies operating in Oregon to adopt a policy restricting the use of facial coverings to narrow instances for medical necessity, undercover operations or SWAT assignment.
Sigh. Most of you know we have had trouble passing a transportation package. We passed a bill during the special session in the fall of last year to raise $4.3 billion dollars for transportation over the next decade via a six-cent gas tax increase, hikes to car registration and title fees and doubling the payroll taxes used for public transit from 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, Republican legislators worked with groups of activists, collected signatures and successfully got those increases referred to the ballot.
Many of us can read the writing on the wall and wanted to just repeal the tax and fee increases from the special session, call it good and start over. We were told by legislative lawyers that we cannot, so we moved the election to May rather than waiting until November to get it over and done and move on. Maybe it will pass? I am doubtful, though I plan to vote yes.
The bill I mentioned in February that I worked on with Representative Mark Gamba to reform the way “the kicker” works did not make it out of committee, but we will try again.
Do you want more details? Or maybe you want to ask a question about something else? Come to the town hall I am doing at the SMILE Station (8210 SE 13th Ave.) with Representative Gamba and Senator Kathleen Taylor Thursday, April 9, 5:30-7 pm.
