Session over, voters to choose on repeat
By JULIA SILVERMAN
and BRAD CAIN
Associated Press
Monday, February 25, 2008 11:24 AM PST
SALEM — The Oregon Legislature’s grand experiment with annual sessions is over, leaving Democrats and Republicans alike crossing their fingers in hopes their efforts will resonate with the voters.
The session was intended as the first step toward convincing Oregonians that a state government with a budget of nearly $15 billion needs more care and feeding than a session every other year can provide.
To make annual sessions the norm, voters will have to approve a constitutional amendment, which they could be asked to consider as soon as 2009.
The session that wrapped up at 9:40 p.m. on Friday left some lawmakers certain that they’d made their point.
‘’We came in, we tackled issues that were critical to Oregonians, and we adjourned a week early,’’ said House Majority Leader Dave Hunt, D-Gladstone. ‘’That makes a powerful case for future annual sessions.’’
Others were skeptical.
‘’It really was the Seinfeld session — it was about nothing,’’ said state Sen. Larry George, R-Sherwood, who had gone to court to try to block it. ‘’We did pass a lot of resolutions honoring people, but I’m not sure the taxpayers got their money’s worth from this.’’
Lawmakers were determined to show their constituents that they could run an efficient ship, despite their reputation as a dysfunctional body, buffed to an unfortunate sheen in years like 2002, when they fought their way through five special sessions to balance the budget.
In some respects, they succeeded, keeping a lid on most partisan fights and passing hot-button legislation like the restriction of driver’s licenses to legal citizens and bonding authority for the University of Oregon to build a $200 million basketball arena.
Outgoing House Speaker Jeff Merkley said the session showcased the need to address issues that weren’t even on the radar screen when the regular session of 2007 closed in June.
For example, he said, lawmakers passed bills to aid victims of natural disasters, in response to December’s coastal storms and floods. Another bill, to require retailers to remove recalled toys from their shelves or face legal action, was a result of recent news reports on toy safety.
In other respects, the brief session showed its limits. Some lobbyists complained that there was little time to talk through contentious bills and that the world wouldn’t have stopped spinning if the policy bills that did pass had waited until the regular meeting in 2009.
Veteran lobbyist Mark Nelson said that most of what the session did wasn’t all that timely or compelling.
‘’If something rises to the level of being a true emergency, the Legislature can already call itself into special session to take care of it,’’ he said. Nelson said the Legislature’s every-other-year setup has ‘’served the state well’’ and has helped to keep maintain the state’s tradition of having citizen legislators.
And some mourned the topics that lawmakers stayed away from, or that were left to languish in committees.
‘’We will have done important work, but this was a mixed success at best, because we left some complex issues on the table, unresolved,’’ said Rep. Mary Nolan, D-Portland.
She cited the Senate’s failure to pass a bill to create a searchable database of adult foster care home workers with abusive records as a key example.
The session was subtly marked by election-year maneuvering. Rep. Greg Macpherson, D-Lake Oswego, was deeply involved in negotiations over a legislative referral on mandatory sentencing for repeat offenders, a high-profile issue for a would-be attorney general.
Merkley, who is trying to capture his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate, suffered a setback when the state Senate refused to consider a bill he’d championed to regulate the mortgage lending industry, a consumer rights cause that plays well among voters in Democratic primaries. In the state Senate, where four Democrats are vying to be their party’s candidate for secretary of state, there was plenty of speechifying on reforming elections, which that office regulates. Such politics are par for the course, particularly if lawmakers are going to meet during election years, said House Minority Leader Bruce Hanna, a Roseburg Republican.
Still, he said, he’ll tell his constituents that the session gave lawmakers a chance to make important fiscal choices.
‘’I’ll tell them that we can better manage state agencies if we can give them attention in both years of the budget,’’ Hanna said.
