The MitchMessage

July 8, 2007 – Preliminary Post-session Message

            I was seated at my House floor desk watching the people streaming onto the House floor.  The gavel had just dropped on the adoption of the resolution to adjourn Sine Die (without a day) and I sat stunned.  It was just after noon on June 28, and we had worked the final two to three days in an orderly fashion.  It was not like anything I had experienced during my prior two sessions in the House. 

            In my MitchMessage just after the 2005 session ended I wrote “As you must know we adjourned Sine Die at 6:21am on Friday, August 5 after a marathon session that had begun nearly 20 hours earlier.  It was a brutal experience and a totally dysfunctional approach to completing the work of the 73rd legislative session.  After taking two three-day holidays during the last couple of weeks, the Speaker insisted on keeping us in session all night, rather than adjourning late in the evening and returning the next morning to finish in daylight and with due deliberation.”  In a quieter adjournment the 2003 session adjourned on August 26.

            This calm and orderly process was symbolic of the way the whole session went.  We had our drama and our excitement, but mostly it was calm and orderly.  This message will focus on the happenings of the final two weeks of the session.  In a couple of weeks, when I get enough distance from it for a proper perspective, I’ll send out an overall review of the session.

            Speaker Merkley announced very early in the session that we would adjourn Sine Die on June 29.  That seemed completely ridiculous to those of us who were accustomed to working until August.  But the schedule was designed to adjourn at the end of June, and adjourn we did – one day ahead of schedule.

            The period began a little slowly.  For the first part of the week the Republicans came into the chamber with the opening call, went through preliminaries, and then asked permission for a recess for a Republican caucus.  They then disappeared for an hour or so and got back to work after 11am.  Then on several days they would make a motion to withdraw some bill or other from one of the committees.  It seemed to be both a stalling tactic and an opportunity to get one of our vulnerable members on the record with a bad vote.  (As I said in previous messages, robo-calls or mass mailings were sent out the day the votes were cast.)  The debate on the vote to withdraw would begin and be relatively brief, since generally it was clear that they didn’t have the 31 votes to succeed on the motion.   They would do a call of the House which brought committees meeting at the same time to a stop, and then would request a voice roll-call vote.  This whole business would take about 45 minutes.  If I remember correctly, they repeated the process five times one day.  I think they only succeeded getting a bill to the floor twice during the period, but both of those bills, including one that would create the office of Lieutenant Governor, were referred back to committee or to the Senate to die. 

            The Speaker stayed very calm during these shenanigans.  He simply made clear that we were going to complete the day’s agenda even if we needed afternoon, evening, and weekend sessions to do so.  And after a couple of late evening sessions and a Saturday session, things pretty much got serious during the last week.  Then the main problem was coordinating our agenda with the Senate leadership.  

             The Senate leadership seemed determined to complete their business early and closed down the committees relatively early.  One of my bills, HJR 18, got caught in this web.  The bill to refer a constitutional amendment on the right to health care to the voters, passed the House but I was informed that it wasn’t going to be moved out of the Senate Rules committee – even though I had the votes to pass it in the Senate.  I had a bit of a melt-down over that news.  HJR 18 was not only the key bill of this session for me, it felt like the key bill of my career.  But with the help of the House caucus leadership a deal was struck that the bill would be moved during the February session.  I got a memo, signed by the leadership of both chambers that they would do everything in their power to make sure that happened.

            We did manage to pass several measures to the people for votes over the next two years.  The most notable was in SJR 4, which is the Healthy Kids plan.  This will ask the voters to put the plan into the constitution, including an 84.5 cent per package increase in  the cigarette tax.  The new revenue would provide health insurance for most of the uninsured children who are legal residents of Oregon.  I believe this will be voted upon in November, 2007. 

We also passed HJR 15, which asks the voters to modify the double majority voting requirement on property tax elections.  It would allow a single majority at regular primary elections and regular general elections.  It will be on the ballot in November, 2008.

            As usual we passed several key budgets during the final two weeks of the session.  Both the higher education budget and the human services budget received large majorities in the House.  Although both budgets provided large increases over the prior budget, I voted against both of them.  They were, in fact, about as good as could have been achieved in this session and I would not have provided the 31st vote to sink either of them.  But our investment in both of those areas is pitiful compared to most of the progressive states in the Union.  Our treatment of higher education over the last 20 years is particularly shameful.  It’s time we figured out a dedicated source of funding for higher education in Oregon.

            On the positive side of the budgetary ledger we passed a great budget for the Oregon Student Assistance Commission.  Funds are included in this budget to implement the Shared Responsibility Model which changes the calculation for grants to include factors other than the cost of education.  Now the Opportunity grant award will vary by income level and family size and will provide much more security about the total funds that will be available to the student over the full college experience.  This new model passed out of the House Education Committee and was supported by the Oregon Student Association and by the Governor’s office.  In addition, we passed an adequate construction budget for both higher education and for the community colleges.

            Other budgets had interesting twists included within them.  For example, the budget for the Parks and Recreation Department included funds for the Capitol grounds to become a state park.  That seemed completely appropriate since I consider the Capitol to be “the Peoples’ building.”   The Capitol receives tens of thousands of visitors each year.  The Government Standards and Practices Commission budget provided for an increase in staff that will allow the agency to do its difficult job.  The name of the agency will be changed to the “Ethics Commission.”  That is going to be quite important because we increased the Commission’s responsibilities with the passage of SB 10 which changes the legal standards for legislators and other public officials.

            And finally, the budget allocation for the Office of Health Policy and Research included sufficient funds for the office to implement the Hospital Acquired Infection Reporting Program.  This program was passed in HB 2524, which was sponsored by me and Rep. Carolyn Tomei.  It passed out of the Senate during this last two week period after passing easily in the House.  It was one of our few bills that, having been sent to the Ways and Means Committee, actually escaped with a budget allocation.  This was an important bill, supported by the hospital community and by consumer advocates alike.  

            As I think about the budgets we passed my frustration returns with the whole Ways and Means process, which seemed to me to have significant perverse elements within it..  There are two powerful nexus of power in the legislature.  The first is the official process headed by the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House.  This is the official structure of the legislature, including the four caucuses and the formal committee structure of the legislature.  And then there is the Ways and Means process, headed by the Ways and Means co-chairs – this session Sen. Kurt Schrader and Rep. Mary Nolan.  The Ways and Means process seems almost like a shadow legislature.  The main constitutional task of the legislature is to produce a balanced budget.  Ways and Means does that difficult task admirably. 

            The budget process begins with the presentation of the Governor’s budget.  His budget is produced before the legislature comes into session, using as its base the most recent official state revenue forecast.  The co-chairs go to work producing the co-chairs budget, which includes policy change decisions they make unilaterally.  That budget version, coming early in the session, takes into account the most recent revenue forecast.  The several W&M sub-committees, guided by the co-chairs’ budget, go to work crafting the dozens of agency-specific budgets that ultimately comprise the state’s budget.  The sub-committees seem to have a great deal of power in crafting these budgets, within the guidelines.

            None of that is what I consider perverse.  Here is the perverse element.  While the W&M process is working, grinding out the budgets and spending most of the available money, the policy committees, such as the House Health Care Committee I chaired, are hard at work producing policy-relevant bills.  If those bills have no significant budgetary impact they flow on to the House and the Senate for a vote.  The exception is if a bill has relevance to another policy committee.  In that case, it goes to another committee for policy consideration and then on to the floor.  But if a bill passed out of a committee is deemed to have a non-trivial budget impact, it is referred on to the Ways and Means Committee.  This decision comes about after the Legislative Fiscal Office asks affected state agencies to estimate the impact of the bill on agency resources.  If the estimate comes back more than $50,000 it is automatically sent to W&M.  Sometimes, inexplicably, it goes to Ways and Means even if without a fiscal impact.

            In Ways and Means producing the budget bills has the first priority, and the budget bills spend most of the money available.  So while that process is going on the bills referred to the committee begin to produce a log-jam of bills waiting for action – action that isn’t going to happen until the budgets are done.  By the time the budget bills were produced, about the second week in June, there were about 250 bills waiting in line in the Ways and Means committee.  While it wasn’t clear what selection criteria were being used, some of them began to pop up in one or another of the sub-committees.  Almost none of the discussions seemed to be about fiscal matters; rather it seemed the bills were getting fresh policy scrutiny.  Some of the bills emerged and were passed during this last two weeks.  Some, even some with zero fiscal impact, did not get a hearing.  All of this led to my feeling that the system was perverse. 

            I’ll discuss key bills in my next message, but there were some of my bills that passed during the last two weeks.  HB 3270 is a bill to create a process for systematically hand recounting a probability sample of ballots from each county during the regular November general election.  It is a good bill, intended to give our citizens confidence in our vote counting machines.  I also worked on SB 1040, which allows school children to self-medicate in cases of asthma and several allergies.  It took a conference committee, but it finally passed. 

            Other important bills that passed included one that regulates the use of non-competing clauses, a bill to prevent selling gift cards with an expiration date, SB 1036 that allows school districts to tax new construction under certain circumstances, and a bill (HB 2263) eliminating the CIM and the CAM.  SB 858 passed, providing collective bargaining rights to adult foster care home providers, as did HB 2082, reforming the signature-gathering process for initiatives.  We managed to do some good work.

Mitch

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