The MitchMessage

April 29, 2007

My next two town hall meetings will be 7pm, May 22 at the Cedar Mill Community Library (NW. Saltzman and Cornell Rd.) and 7pm, May 29 at the NW Library (NW. 23rd and Thurman).

When I first ran for office I asked a veteran lobbyist what he expected of me in return for the campaign contribution I was soliciting.  He said he expected two things.  First, when he requested a meeting with me I would meet with him.  And second, when I told him how I was going to vote on a bill, I would either vote that way or let him know I had changed my mind.  He said it was very embarrassing to tell a client how a bill was going to come out and then find it wasn’t going to come out that way.  I learned it is perfectly fine to tell a lobbyist you are undecided or you are a “soft” yes, which means you might change.  But a yes means a yes and a no means a no.

This came into play this week for me as I was working to get HB 3099, the water fluoridation bill out of the Health Care Committee and on to the House floor.  The lobbyist for the Oregon Dental Association, the main proponent of the fluoride bill, assured me that I had the five votes I needed to move the bill, and that there were 32 firm yes votes in the House.  But I was frankly worried that one of the “sure” yes votes in committee might not turn out to be a yes.

Another quaint custom I learned early in my first session was the “courtesy” yes vote in committee.  A courtesy yes vote comes when a committee member, who will likely vote no, agrees to vote yes in committee to allow a bill to move to the House floor for debate.  This usually happens when a member is planning on voting no, but doesn’t have a problem with the bill being debated on the floor and acted upon by the full body.  A courtesy yes played an important part in the committee action on HB 3099. 

Since I supposedly had five sure yes votes I was prepared to move the bill.  But I asked a member of the committee, who was an announced no vote, if the member would provide a courtesy yes, if the sure yes vote went south.  The member agreed to do so, if the motion took a certain form.  As it came to pass the member who was a sure yes steamed out of the committee room as the bill was being debated and didn’t return until after the vote.  The committee voted to move the bill to the House floor, on a 5-3 vote.  There is a fabric of trust among members of the House and courtesy votes strengthen that fabric, while a “sure” vote that disappears, weakens that fabric.

A member who refused to vote on the House floor Thursday triggered the strangest floor session I’ve observed during my three terms in the House.  I carried HB 2201, the Healthy Kids act, on the House floor Thursday.  The bill would provide health insurance for all of the uninsured children of Oregon, some 120,000 kids.  Since the program would be financed by an increase in the tobacco tax, it required a 3/5 majority to pass.  We had a very spirited debate on the measure, which began to deteriorate into a series of parliamentary moves, intended to delay or avoid a vote.  There were many members, mostly in the minority party, who did not want to vote for a tax increase, but also did not want to vote against a great plan to get health insurance to children. 

Finally, there was a call of the House, which requires members to remain on the floor, there was a motion to end debate (after about two hours), and the vote on the bill began.  All of the members voted except one member and the bill was not going to get the required 36 vote majority, having only 32 yes votes.  But that member, Rep. John Lim, refused to vote.  Rep. Lim announced he was not going to vote at this time, since debate had been cut off.  The House rules require each member on the floor to vote, but they don’t say what to do if one refuses to vote.  Since we were under a call of the House nobody could leave the floor and since we were in the middle of a vote no other motion was in order.  Consequently, the sixty members of the House sat around waiting for the impasse to end.  It was quite a zoo, until the speaker finally announced that Rep. Lim was in violation of the rules and announced the bill had failed to achieve the required 36 aye votes.  The final vote was 32-27.  Rep. Lim continued his protest by remaining at his desk on the House floor until the next morning.

Despite this odd session the House passed many important bills during this last two weeks.  Perhaps the most controversial of them happened early in the period when the House passed SB 2 and HB 2007.  As you imagine, the debate was furious over creating the contractual relationship of domestic partnerships for same sex couples and prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.  Both bills passed the House after amendments were added to HB 2007 giving churches and other religious organizations broad exemptions from the discrimination provisions.  I got a great deal of very hostile e-mail over my yes vote on these bills, although most of it was from outside my district.

We passed HB 2082, which reforms the signature-gathering process on initiative campaigns.  I learned a great deal about this process as I worked to qualify the HOPE amendment to the constitution for the November, 2006 ballot.  I supported this bill, which passed the House easily.

We passed a modification of the Oregon Family Leave Act (HB 2485) to allow employees to use paid accrued sick leave when taking family leave.  I received a great deal of supportive e-mail on this bill.

We worked on several important bills, in committee and on the floor, relating to hospitals.  For example, we moved a bill to the Ways and Means Committee that requires hospitals to report hospital-acquired infections.  I believe that bill will survive the Ways and Means process and will get to the floor.  And we passed HB 3290 on the floor, which requires hospitals to report on their contributions to charity and other community benefit activities in a much clearer way.

And finally, we passed one of my favorite bills. One of my pet projects over the last couple of sessions relates to the Washington County commuter train that will begin running between Wilsonville and Beaverton in the fall of 2008.  I have long believed that it is possible to extend that train line to allow it to operate between Beaverton and Salem.  We passed HB 2472 that creates a task force to explore extending that rail service to Salem.  If that task force begins work as soon as session is over, the earliest this extension could take place would be 2018.  As I carried that bill on the floor I began the debate by blowing a train whistle, which certainly woke up the Body.

April 30 is the last day most of the House committees can work on House bills and most of the Senate committees can work on Senate bills.  So we now move into the phase where we begin working seriously on bills from the other chamber.  The leadership is really committed to adjourning by the end of June.  We’ll see.

Mitch