The five-week Oregon legislative session started in February with more than 260 bills aimed at tackling issues from roads funding to data privacy to school funding to federal immigration and tax policies.
Now, halfway through the session and past the Feb. 16 deadline for bills to get voted out of subject-matter committees and onto the House and Senate floors for full votes, fewer bills remain. The dust has begun to settle around some proposals that died early without advancing, including several priority bills for Republicans in the minority in both the House and Senate.
Some of the session’s most controversial proposals that require raising money or making changes to existing law — such as attempts to tweak the state’s rollout of campaign finance contribution limits — are immune to general deadlines while they await hearings and votes in exempt rules, revenue or joint committees. Lawmakers have until the March 8 end of session to decide what to do with those measures.
Among the most ambitious proposals to die an early death was Senate Bill 1555, an attempt to overhaul the methodology used to figure out how much money the state sends to Oregon’s schools every two years. Both Republicans and Democrats on a joint interim committee and the Senate Education Committee had qualms about the process being rushed during the short session, while advocates argued it ultimately accepts a broken status quo that leaves some high needs schools underfunded. It died Friday in the Senate Education Committee.
“The problem isn’t going away and we need everyone back at the table during the legislative interim, working together until we find common ground and clear a path to get this right in 2027,” said Louis Wheatley, a spokesperson for Foundations for a Better Oregon, a nonprofit education advocacy group that had backed the bill.
Dead bills
Several Republican priority bills did not make it out of the committees where they were first introduced.
Among them was a bill proposed by Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany, to roll back greenhouse gas emission reduction targets under the Climate Protection Program, Oregon’s bedrock climate change law. Another, proposed by Rep. Alek Skarlatos, R-Canyonville, would have repealed a 2025 law that expanded unemployment insurance benefits to striking workers.
Two bills proposed by state Sen. Christine Drazan, R-Canby, died early, including one bipartisan bill to prohibit public health and harm reduction groups from handing out free hypodermic needles and syringes to drug users within 2,000 feet of schools or child care centers. The other bill would have allowed teachers to remove disruptive students from their classrooms, and required students be held back who are unable to demonstrate grade-level proficiency in core subjects in third grade. Both would have come up against legal challenges as they have in other states, critics pointed out.
On the Senate Floor on Monday, Drazan accused her colleagues of “posturing” and “virtue signaling,” about kids’ safety and learning rather than passing the two bills.
Another bipartisan proposal to exempt Woodburn from some of the state’s urban growth boundary limitations so more housing could be built, ideally for the area’s farmworker population, also died. Powerful farming groups, including the Oregon Farm Bureau, opposed the bill, stating that a process for requesting urban growth boundary expansions is already established in existing state law, and that Woodburn should follow that process.
A few ambitious bills brought by Democrats died early, including a revived proposal from the 2025 session that would have required Google and large tech companies to pay for the local news content those companies take at no cost, aggregate and profit from. The bill died after one public hearing due to a lack of support from moderate Democrats.
Another proposal to require contractors and grant recipients accepting money from state agencies to attest they won’t transport individuals detained on behalf of federal immigration agents also died after a single public hearing. Most of the Democrats’ proposals to strengthen the state’s protections for immigrants and to push back on aggressive federal immigration enforcements continue to move closer to final votes.
Hotly debated, deadline exempt
Legislative leaders sent several hotly debated bills to committees unbound by deadlines. Among them are a bill to let teens vote in primaries, another to let local governments spend collected hotel taxes on things not related to tourism and to open the state’s primary elections instead of allowing only those registered with a party to vote for party candidates.
Two bills that would redirect the portions of the kicker tax refund to the state’s general fund or to public schools are still alive. The latter will have its first public hearing on Thursday in the Senate Finance and Revenue Committee.
A Republican bill that would require the state to replicate recent federal tax code changes that allow individuals to write off a portion of private school tuition from their federal income taxes is still alive and awaits vetting in the education subcommittee of the Joint Ways and Means Committee.
A bill sponsored by Democrats that would require more transparency from lobbyists about what bills they’re lobbying for or against on behalf of clients is on life support in the Senate Rules Committee, according to James Browning, executive director of the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit climate group F Minus who helped draft the proposal. The bill was sent straight to the Rules Committee the first day of the session and it hasn’t had any public hearing scheduled.
Browning suspects the bill will have an uphill fight against the Capitol Club, a trade group for lobbyists with its own office in the State Capitol in Salem, which registered 13 of its own members as lobbyists for the club for the first time in more than a decade at the beginning of the session. Though there’s been no public testimony against the bill, Browning said he was surprised the club beefed up its representation after meeting with F Minus’s Oregon Director Aidan Bassett.
“I’ve worked on similar bills in other states going back 20 years and I can’t recall a state lobbyist association fighting a transparency bill in such an organized and potentially overwhelming way,” Browning said in an email.
Dale Penn, president of the Capitol Club, said in an email that they registered those members to lobby on behalf of the organization in an effort to “ensure full transparency.”
“Because proposed legislation this session could directly affect Capitol Club and its members, we anticipate that legislators may seek input from our leadership,” he said. “Registering simply ensures that any such conversations occur in a clear and compliant manner under Oregon law.”
Oregon Capital Chronicle
Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and X.