Salem Political Snark

Corporatization of Oregon health care is a big problem

It's obvious that the health care system here in the United States has major problems. As is heard so often, we spend much more per capita than other comparable countries, but have poorer health.

Since I worked in this state as a health planner and policy analyst way back when (1970s and 1980s), I like to joke that I must have done a great job, since now our health care system is problem-free. Of course, the unfunny reality is that the same cost, access, and quality of care problems then are with us now.

Plus some.

Such as the corporatization of health care in Oregon, the subject of last Friday's Salem City Club program. It featured Senator Deb Patterson, Chair of the Oregon Senate Health Care Committee; Rep. Ben Bowman (D), House Majority Leader; and Hayden Rooke-Ley, J.D., Health Care law and policy expert.

Bowman, Patterson, and Rooke-Ley

The basic problem is that there's been a rapid increase in for-profit corporations buying up medical practices in Oregon. Yet everyone agrees that physicians should be in charge of providing medical care, and our state requires that physicians must have at least a 51% ownership of a practice.

So how is it that, according to a story in today's Oregonian ("Health care giant Optum faces new scrutiny in Oregon after fumbled arrival in Eugene, but it's already entrenched in Oregon"), physicians at the Oregon Medical Group are deeply unhappy with their new corporate owner?

Here's how the story starts out:

Dr. Amandajo Sanders knew changes were likely when, in 2020, health care colossus Optum purchased the Eugene medical group where she worked.

She never suspected that Optum’s reboot of the Oregon Medical Group would so completely reinvent the place. The focus, she said, became money, efficiencies and quotas. In addition to treating patients, doctors were expected to do medical coding, answer patient questions submitted on the group’s digital “My Chart” system, and perform other administrative chores once the job of support staff.

And she took a 5% pay cut.

Sanders quit seven months later, leaving the practice of medicine at age 40.

“They did not give us the support that we needed,” Sanders said. “I was taking all that work home, and it was unsustainable.”

About 30 of her colleagues left, too, over the past two years.

As first reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive in March, the exodus of Oregon Medical Group physicians has put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patients into health care purgatory. Its new owner notified many — it hasn’t specified the number — by letter that it no longer had the capacity to treat them, and that they would have to seek care elsewhere. With no primary care doctor, people don’t have access to preventive care, they can’t get referrals to specialists, and it’s hard to even refill a prescription.

This fiasco after a corporate takeover of the Oregon Medical Group was cited by the panelists at the City Club problem. They said that 10,000 people in Eugene are without a doctor now, because of the departure of so many physicians who used to be with the practice.

What makes the situation even worse is that the departing physicians had to sign non-compete agreements that prevent them from working in the Eugene area after they left the Oregon Medical Group.

I'd never heard of such a thing. It seems horribly wrong. Health care isn't like working for a technology company where you might have proprietary information in your head. A physician's knowledge is supposed to be used to help people, not enrich a greedy corporation. 

(The Federal Trade Commission has banned non-compete agreements in health care and elsewhere, but that regulation hasn't taken effect yet and will be challenged in court.)

But what about the 51% physician ownership requirement? How did Optum get away with a for-profit corporation controlling the Eugene medical practice? The answer provided by Rep. Bowman was complicated, but went something like this.

A legislative committee with health care oversight responsibilities got ahold of a piece of paper that showed the ownership structure of the Oregon Medical Group after Optum took over. The MSO (Management Services Organization) that handled administrative and management duties at the medical clinic was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Optum corporation.

A MSO is supposed to serve the needs of the physicians at a practice. But in this case the servant became the ruler, telling the physicians what they had to do. Somehow none of the physicians who previously owned the Oregon Medical Group were shown as owners on the piece of paper. Instead, I recall that a single physician constituted the 51% ownership requirement, and that person was doing the bidding of Optum.

So the corporation found a legal loophole in Oregon law that allowed Optum to take over the Oregon Medical Group. House Bill 4130 was an attempt to limit the role of corporations in health care. It was introduced in this year's short legislative session, passed in the House, then got stuck in the Senate after a great deal of corporate lobbying against it.

Bowman and Patterson said the bill will be reintroduced in 2025, with some changes to strengthen it. Hopefully it will pass this time. An Oregon Capital Chronicle story describes what HB 4130 would have done. 

House Bill 4130 would prevent private equity firms from controlling medical practices and dictating patient treatment or making hiring decisions, though clinics could hire outside administrators to handle paperwork and the bill would exclude telemedicine providers, hospitals and long-term care facilities. 

Bill to make standard time permanent is dead this session. Great news.

My day, which wasn't going so well, in part because I'd left my iPhone at home so felt out-of-touch while grocery shopping, brightened up a lot when I returned, checked on what's happening in the world, and saw a notice from the Statesman Journal that the bill to make standard time permanent in Oregon had met a well-deserved death in the short legislative session that is wrapping up soon.

House Speaker Dan Rayfield essentially killed legislation to adopt permanent Pacific Standard Time in most of Oregon, sending the proposal to the Emergency Management, General Government and Veterans Committee with just days left in the 2024 short legislative session.

This is great news for us lovers of Daylight Saving Time, which begins next Sunday. My wife and I much prefer having an extra hour of light in the evening rather than the morning. So do most Americans, since  a recent poll showed that two-thirds said they prefer daylight saving time in some form, permanent or part of the year, with just one-third preferring permanent standard time.

As I said in "Oregon needs permanent daylight saving time, not permanent standard time," this was a screwy idea by State Senator Kim Thatcher of Keizer that never should have seen the light of day.

The reason it passed the Senate on a narrow 16-14 vote is that an amendment was added requiring that the only way Oregon could move to permanent standard time is if both Washington and California do the same thing. Which makes sense, since otherwise a Vancouver resident who works in Portland would have to change their clock twice a day upon crossing the Columbia River.

Big thanks to House Speaker Dan Rayfield for saving Oregon from the nightmare of permanent standard time. I'm so grateful to him, Rayfield already has my endorsement for governor, or any other higher office he might choose to pursue, along with a $100 commitment to his campaign fund.

An Oregonian story by Lizzy Acker has more details about how House Bill 1548 met its end. The only bad news, according to the Statesman Journal story, is that Thatcher plans to reintroduce her bad idea in the 2025 legislative session.

The clock, it seems, has run out on Oregon’s chance to switch to standard time for good.

A bill that have would put Oregon on permanent standard time if Washington and California made the same switch narrowly passed the Senate on Monday. But shortly after its passage, House Speaker Dan Rayfield, a Democrat from Corvallis, consigned the bill to die.

Now, the House will not get a chance to vote on whether to end the twice-yearly time change.

“We received the bill later than we would usually take on Senate policy bills since it got referred back to committee before making it over here,” said Hazel Tylinski, a spokesperson for Rayfield. “Given the shortened timeline and the queue of critical bills we’re still working through, we aren’t able to give enough time to consider the merits of the bill in the time we have left this session.”

Senate Bill 1548 would have ended the practice of switching to daylight saving time and instead kept most of Oregon on standard time year-round.

“I like the concept that was brought forward this session and would be interested in supporting something similar in the future,” Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a Portland area Democrat and one of the sponsors of the bill, in a statement. “This is an important change that will make a difference for not only the health and safety of Oregonians but also for people like me whose religious practices are tied to sunrise and sunset.”

Oregon passed a bill to switch to permanent daylight saving time in 2019, but that requires an act of Congress which has yet to materialize. After that effort, many groups came out against the idea of a permanent daylight saving time, noting that in the past, switches to permanent daylight saving time caused a variety of problems, including the deaths of children who were hit by vehicles on the way to school in the dark.

A change to permanent standard time requires no congressional involvement.

After Oregon senators evenly split on an earlier version of the bill in late February, changes were made to the proposal to ensure that Oregon would not switch to permanent standard time unless California and Washington also did. That version of the bill passed the Senate on a 16-14 vote Monday before Rayfield referred it to a House committee that is not scheduled to meet before the session’s required end of March 10.

A similar bill in the Washington state legislature also did not move forward this session.

And time marches on. Daylight saving time will begin at 2 a.m. on March 10.

Bill to make standard time permanent in Oregon falters in legislature

Good news today for most people in Oregon, given that national polls show that about 2/3 of people either want daylight saving time made permanent, or favor sticking with the current twice-yearly time change, and there's no reason to think Oregonians feel differently.

But state Senator Kim Thatcher figures that she knows best, so she introduced SB 1548, which would make standard time permanent in our state. I think this is a terrible idea. Here's the reasons why that I included in messages to my state senator and representative where I urged a "no" vote on the bill.

(1) This bill affects every Oregonian. It deserves wide discussion and debate, not a rushed vote in a short session of the legislature.

 

(2) National polls show that most Americans favor daylight saving time, either in permanent or the current eight-month form. There’s no reason to think that Oregonians are any different.

 

(3) If SB 1548 passed, Oregon would only be the third state to have permanent standard time, joining Hawaii and Arizona. Those states are much farther south than Oregon with much more daylight year round.

 

(4) SB 1548 would put Oregon in a different time zone than Washington, California, and every other state other than Hawaii and Arizona. So every trip across the Columbia River would put an Oregonian in a different time zone, as would crossing into Idaho or California.

 

(5) Oregonians hugely value outdoor activities. This bill takes away an hour of daylight in the evening from March until November, which is when the weather is best for walking, hiking, biking, and other activities outdoors.

Today SB 1548 was voted on in the senate. At first it failed on a 15-15 tie. Then Thatcher changed her vote to "no" so she could make a motion to reconsider the bill. That had to be done today given rules for the short legislative session. 

One senator agreed to keep SB 1548 alive by requiring that the bill be sent back to the Rules Committee so language could be added that says Oregon would only move to permanent standard time after Washington and California pass legislation to do this. This passed on a 16-14 vote.

I'd prefer that SB 1548 be killed completely, but this was a positive move for us lovers of daylight saving time. This month Washington failed to pass a bill to make standard time permanent in our neighbor to the north for the second year in a row. Hopefully that trend will continue.

In California, a bill to make standard time permanent, AB 1776, was introduced in the state legislature this year. Because it modifies a voter-approved initiative, the bill needs a 2/3 vote in the legislature to be approved, which is a pretty high bar. Also good news.

So even if the Oregon legislature were to pass SB 1548, since the amended version will require Washington and California to make standard time permanent before SB 1548 takes effect, it sure seems like our neighboring states are unlikely to do this soon, though politics is full of surprises.

The Oregon Capital Chronicle has a good story by Julia Shumway about today's SB 1548 happenings. Like I said, the bill survived, but given the low probability of both Washington and California approving legislation to make standard time permanent in the near future, the agreement to amend the bill is the next best thing to killing it. Here's excerpts from Shumway's story. Sara Gelser Blouin is my state senator. Good to see that she voted "no" on the bill, offering some good reasons why.

An effort to switch Oregon to permanent standard time will live to see another day after hitting a temporary roadblock on Tuesday when the state Senate split evenly on the bill.

It takes 16 “yes” votes to pass a bill in the 30-member Senate, and Sen. Kim Thatcher’s Senate Bill 1548had just 15 senators on board when it first came up for a vote on Tuesday. That set the Keizer Republican and other supporters on a mission to change a colleague’s mind or find a compromise in the minutes before the Senate adjourned for the day and dashed all hopes for ending the twice-annual clock change.

Several hushed, intense conversations later, Thatcher and Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, D-Portland, had a solution: Instead of trying to have Oregon lead the way on switching to standard time and hoping other West Coast states would catch up, supporters agreed to amend the bill to add a trigger clause clarifying that Oregon would only ditch daylight saving time if and when Washington and California do the same. 

...Sen. Lynn Findley, R-Vale, represents a vast section of eastern Oregon including Malheur County, which is on Mountain time and would have ended up two hours ahead of the rest of Oregon if the bill passed as drafted. Findley supported it.

But Sen. Bill Hansell, the Athena Republican who represents northeast Oregon, had the same concerns as Sen. Michael Dembrow, a Democrat who represents north Portland. Hansell said his constituents, many of whom do business in Washington and go to Walla Walla, Washington, for services that aren’t available in smaller eastern Oregon cities, want to make sure they stay in the same zone as Washington. 

Dembrow sees the same issue on a larger scale in Portland, where thousands of people commute between Portland and Vancouver or southwest Washington each day. 

“What that means is that for two-thirds of the year, Portland will be an hour different from Vancouver and southwest Washington,” he said. “All of those people – there are thousands of people who live in southwest Washington and commute to Oregon, or vice versa, are going to have to change their watches twice every day.” 

...Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, said switching to standard time might make more sense in southern states that don’t see the same swings in daylight hours. Portland is dark for nearly 16 hours a day in December, while the sun is out for more than 15 hours in peak summer. Her constituents and her brother have strong feelings about ending the annual switch, which Gelser Blouin said her brother calls “abuse of clocks.” 

Gelser Blouin said she understands arguments for keeping standard time for students who need to get to school safely. The sun has been rising earlier and earlier for the past few weeks, and by March 9, the last day before daylight saving time begins, it’ll rise around 6:30 a.m. The following Monday, the sun won’t rise until 7:30 a.m. But Gelser Blouin said the real problem to fix is early school start times. 

“With apologies to my brother, my no vote will once again support ‘abuse of clocks,’” she said. 

Oregon needs daylight saving time, not permanent standard time

One of the worst bills introduced in this year's short legislative session calls for Oregon to move to permanent standard time, thereby doing away with the much-beloved (by me and many others) daylight saving time.

This is a horrible idea.

State Senator Kim Thatcher of Keizer introduced Senate Bill 1548, which hopefully will have a well-deserved legislative death. Senator Deb Patterson, who represents part of the Salem area, is a co-sponsor of the bill. I hope she comes to her senses.

Oregon already has passed legislation calling on Congress to allow our state, along with Washington and California, to be on permanent daylight saving time. This would have several benefits: no more changing of clocks twice a year, more light in the late afternoon and early evening when most people want to be outside after work or school.

National polls show that most Americans prefer permanent daylight saving time. For example:


Two-thirds of those polled said they prefer daylight saving time in some form, permanent or part of the year, with just one-third preferring permanent standard time.

We'll be returning to daylight saving time on March 10. I can hardly wait. It's great to be able to walk our dog in the late afternoon when the sun is still shining brightly, instead of close to or after it sets. My mood perks up when daylight saving time returns. 

Sure, it's a bit of an inconvenience to switch clocks twice a year. I adjust to the change in sleep pattern quite easily, though I realize others have more of a problem with this. Well, the solution for them is to press Congress to approve the request of Oregon, Washington, and California to make daylight saving time permanent in the west coast states.

It sure isn't to pass unpopular legislation making standard time permanent. The only states that have done this are Hawaii and Arizona. Note their characteristics: they have lots of sun and are much farther south than Oregon!

There's no way Senate Bill 1548 should even have a hearing, much less be considered a serious legislative proposal.

This subject deserves a lot of consideration and public input. Given the popularity of daylight saving time, it's much better to do nothing and preserve the status quo where Oregon enjoys daylight saving time for part of the year, than to rush into permanent standard time.

You can read about the benefits of daylight saving time in "Daylight Saving Time Is Actually a Good Thing." Excerpt:

In reality, DST is an eight-month experiment designed to make life, well, more pleasurable for humans. The basic idea: In the Western world, we typically spend more awake time in the evenings than in the mornings. We also enjoy many benefits from being awake in the sunshine. This National Institutes of Health overview is a good place to read about vitamin D, increased exercise, increased socializing, and overall improvements to mental health that come with sunlight.

Absent DST, for eight months per year our days would not be structured to enjoy the most sunlight possible. Our mornings would be bright and cheerful, but the sun would tend to be set before we leave work each day. This stinks! This gives the average 9-5 adult very little time to enjoy sunlight.

So during the spring, summer, and early autumn, we tweak it, just a bit, so that there’s more sunlight in the evening. In the winter, we abandon DST, because there just isn’t enough sunlight to make a difference. Winter is pretty much a dark hellworld no matter how it’s scheduled. Winter DST would give us a very, very late sunrise and not enough light in the evening to provide the effects we want.

Well, I disagree with that last conclusion. And it doesn't fit with the preference of 46% of Americans for permanent daylight saving time. But like I said, eight months of daylight saving time is much better than no daylight saving time. I'm fine with leaving things as they are. What I'm strongly opposed to is the screwy idea of permanent standard time.

Republican state senators who walked out can't run again. Sweet justice!

It was an Oregon Supreme Court decision that made me ever so happy.

Yesterday the court ruled unanimously that a ballot measure passed by voters in 2022 meant that ten Republicans in the state Senate can't run for re-election because they walked out of the 2023 legislative session for ten days.

An Oregon Capital Chronicle story describes the decision. 

Republican senators who participated last year in the longest walkout in state history cannot seek reelection in 2024 or 2026, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday. 

In a unanimous decision, the court rejected arguments from five Republican senators that Measure 113, a voter-approved 2022 law meant to dissuade lawmakers from walking out and shutting down the legislative process, was poorly worded and would give them another term in office. Instead, the court agreed with state attorneys, who urged justices to consider voters’ intent with the 2022 law, which bars any lawmaker with 10 or more unexcused absences from serving another term. 

“Because the text is capable of supporting the secretary’s interpretation, and considering the clear import of the ballot title and explanatory statement in this case, we agree with the secretary that voters would have understood the amendment to mean that a legislator with 10 or more unexcused absences during a legislative session would be disqualified from holding legislative office during the immediate next term, rather than the term after that,” the ruling said. 

The ruling means 10 Republican senators – one-third of the Senate – are ineligible for reelection. Two of the 10, Sens. Bill Hansell of Athena and Lynn Findley of Vale, already planned to retire. Four others – Sens. Daniel Bonham of The Dalles, Cedric Hayden of Fall Creek, Kim Thatcher of Keizer and Suzanne Weber of Tillamook – were elected to four-year terms in 2022 and will serve until January 2027.

And four, including Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, R-Bend, must end their Senate careers – at least temporarily – in January. Knopp and Sens. Brian Boquist of Dallas, Dennis Linthicum of Klamath Falls and Art Robinson of Cave Junction all tried to file for reelection last year and were waiting on the outcome of the court case. 

Hopefully this will be a wakeup call for Republicans in the Oregon legislature.

You were elected to be part of representative democracy. That's your political job. If you don't feel like doing it, you should resign and let someone serve who actually wants to fulfill their duty to the constituents who voted them in.

Walking out when you can't get your way because Republicans are the minority party in both the state House and Senate is akin to an adult temper tantrum. Childish. Immature. Deserving of a time out. Which is exactly what the ten Republicans who can't run again deserve, and what they're getting.

Astoundingly, Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, one of the walkouts who can't run again in 2024, said on Wednesday in another Oregon Capital Chronicle story that if the Supreme Court doesn't rule in favor of them, Republicans might stage another walkout in the short legislative session that begins next week. 

Knopp, who led the walkout, said Wednesday he thinks Republicans will win regardless of how the court rules: Either Republicans will get to run for reelection, or Democrats will need to provide incentives for lame-duck Republican senators to attend floor sessions. He made his comments during a session preview event hosted by the Oregon Legislative Correspondents Association. 

“If the court sides with us, it’s a clear victory,” Knopp said. “If it doesn’t, I think we still win because our members literally have no reason to show up, and so in order for them to show up, they’re going to want to see that they’re going to be able to make a difference.”

Democrats, who hold 17 seats in the state Senate, need at least three Republicans to attend each day of the legislative session to meet the Legislature’s two-thirds quorum requirement. Otherwise, they can’t pass a single bill. 

That gives Republicans in the Senate – and the House, where Republicans control 25 of 60 seats – leverage to scuttle Democratic proposals by refusing to participate in the month-long legislative session that begins Monday. The session will focus on spurring housing production, something Republicans and Democrats largely agree on as a priority, but also on responding to the state’s addiction crisis and tweaking a voter-approved drug decriminalization law. 

So we'll see. Will Republicans show up to do their job, or will they act like a three-year-old who cries and screams because she didn't eat her dinner but wants dessert nonetheless?

I'm hoping they'll do their job. But if I were to bet, I'd put money on the temper tantrum. 

Measure 110 should be reformed, but going back to "war on drugs" is a bad idea

Oregon is continuing to get national attention for Measure 110, which voters approved in November 2020. It decriminalized possession of previously illegal drugs. Now, though, the backlash against Measure 110 threatens to make Oregon a poster child for what not to do about drugs.

An article in the January 22, 2024 issue of The New Yorker describes the high hopes that accompanied the passage of Measure 110.

In November, 2020, Oregon launched a historic experiment: the Drug Decriminalization and Addiction Treatment Initiative, known as Measure 110. Approved by fifty-eight per cent of voters, it made Oregon the first state to decriminalize possessing small amounts of illicit drugs. It also funnelled hundreds of millions of cannabis-tax dollars toward addiction treatment, housing, peer support, and harm reduction.

A citizen panel that included people with “lived experience”—histories of substance use—would decide how the money was spent. Programs in Black, Native, and other “historically underserved” communities would be prioritized. The law’s overarching goal, according to Tera Hurst, the director of the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, was to force “a shift in attitude toward people who use drugs and how we treat them.”

The article notes attempts to either repeal or drastically revamp Measure 110.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, there seemed to be a new op-ed or county resolution each week calling for Measure 110 to be repealed. “Did Measure 110 take away ‘rock bottom’? Oregon cops seem to think so,” KGW News proclaimed. It did not escape notice that almost no one used the hotline number that police were supposed to give drug users.

In its first fifteen months, there were only a hundred and nineteen callers, at a cost that worked out to more than seven thousand dollars per conversation. A report by Oregon’s secretary of state dryly noted, “It is unclear if the M110-specific hotline provides the best value.”

Legislators came under pressure to either reform the law or dismantle it. A group bankrolled by Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder, and by Tim Boyle, the C.E.O. of Columbia Sportswear, filed paperwork to gather signatures for a partial repeal. Max Williams, a former Republican legislator and corrections official who helps lead the effort, told me, “I don’t think it should ever be the policy of a state to accept that people have a legitimate choice to use lethal drugs.”

In Portland, he said, “we’ve got an exodus of capital, a cratering out of the central city.” Last June, the state recriminalized minor possession of fentanyl. Governor Tina Kotek, who had remained largely silent on Measure 110, recommended recriminalizing most drug possession and public use.

It seems clear that some sort of legislation to reform Measure 110 will be introduced in the short 35-day legislative session that begins in early February.

And it will probably pass, so long as the bill(s) aren't as extreme as the repeal Republicans want, nor as minimal as the "let Measure 110 stay mostly as is" approach the Drug Policy Alliance wants.

An opinion piece by Randy Stapilus in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, "Measure 110 in need of fixes rather than repeal," strikes a nice balance between the haters and lovers of Measure 110. Here's an excerpt:

For all the talk about repealing Measure 110, most legislative activity now seems to involve additions and fixes for its problems rather than changing the core direction, which is what approval of Measure 110 by voters signals the public wants.

However, the will of voters can and should be met with changes on how to execute that new direction. The largest failure with Measure 110, so far, has been implementation: Prevention and treatment efforts have been slow, along with measures to ban activity, such as the public use of drugs, to mirror state law on alcohol and marijuana.

Measure 110 has suffered from its timeline – changing enforceable drug laws in just 13 weeks between the election and the law change and long before treatment and other efforts could be set up – along with several gaps in the law.

Many early complaints about the measure concerned the slow expansion of treatment efforts. More recently, however, those projects have expanded. The 2021 Senate Bill 755 set up Behavioral Health Resource Networks, described as “an entity or group of entities working together to provide comprehensive, community-based services and supports to people with substance use disorders or harmful substance use.” This took time. The state set up a network in each county and tribal area before using grant funds to cover the cost of services to individuals.

The measure probably was overly comprehensive and uniform: Different drugs may call for different responses. Approaches to dealing with opioids (many of which are legal in some cases) is a different proposition than going after methamphetamines or cocaine. Legislation could address the differences.

Even more important is the absence in 110 of serious leverage to pressure – even force – drug users away from bad behavior and into treatment or some other consequence. What might that leverage look like? One option might involve building on the drug courts, active in Oregon as in many other states for many years by giving public officials – and maybe judges – broad authority to compel people to comply with recovery efforts. 

Policymakers can consider as well that much of Oregon’s law relating to drugs, establishing crimes and penalties relating to manufacture and trafficking, remains in force and continues to be a powerful tool.

In October a large Oregon delegation visited Portugal, which two decades ago moved from a crimalized-based to a health service approach to drug use, to pick up lessons from the experience. Portugal seems to have little interest in reversing its course. 

One of the participants, Janie Gullickson, the executive director of the Portland-based Mental Health and Addiction Association, remarked that, “It took Portugal eight years to see results they were hoping to see from their drastic change from a criminal approach to addiction to a health care approach. So it’s going to take time, innovation and collaboration. We’re year three, right?”

Elected officials seldom are wise simply to smack down a clearly expressed will of the voters. Voters do tend to appreciate, though, efforts to make their will work better. 

Priorities for upcoming legislative session revealed at Salem City Club

I tried to make the title of this blog post convey an enticing peek into what's going to be focused on during the 35-day short legislative session in this even numbered year, which begins February 5.

But anyone who follows Oregon politics at all closely won't be surprised by what the Speaker of the House, Democrat Dan Rayfield, and House Minority Leader, Republican Jeff Helfrich, agreed would be the session priorities at a Salem City Club meeting today: Big Decisions -- A Preview of the 2024 Oregon Legislative Short Session.

Addressing the shortcomings of Measure 110, which largely decriminalized the sale and use of formerly illegal drugs, and addressing homelessness and a lack of housing.

I'd never heard Dan Rayfield, shown above, speak. He was impressive. Sharp, witty, personable. After the program ended, someone mentioned to me that he's talked about as a future governor of Oregon. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened from what I saw of him today.

My apologies to Jeff Helfrich for not including a photo of him. He was stuck in his Hood River district due to the continuing bad weather in that area, so had to participate in the City Club meeting via a sometimes balky Zoom connection. Helfrich's fuzzy image on a screen didn't do justice to him, so I didn't take a photo.

Rayfield and Helfrich engaged in some entertaining banter. They clearly like and respect each other, an appealing quality given how nasty things are between Democrats and Republicans on a national level. Both spoke of wanting to engage in bipartisanship during the upcoming legislative session. Of course, most politicians speak that way. We'll see how it goes when the rubber meets the bill-passing road soon.

Both men said that a key problem with Measure 110 is inadequate incentives for drug users to get into treatment programs. Rayfield noted that some drug users need a public health approach, while other users need a criminal justice approach. Helfrich said that something like DUI (driving under the influence) diversion into treatment would provide more accountability for drug users.

Regarding housing, Helfrich said that it takes too long for housing projects to be approved. Oregon's land use laws are a big issue. He favors expanding urban growth boundaries to enlarge the supply of available land for housing. Rayfield said the legislature is engaging in community outreach to determine the best mix of addressing (1) people who don't have housing, (2) keeping people in housing, and (3) building more housing.

A question from the audience asked about the possibility of using 20% of the "kicker," which refunds money to taxpayers when actual revenues exceed projected revenues by a certain amount, to support local government budgets. Rayfield said that kicker reform won't be addressed in the upcoming session. He noted that Salem isn't alone among cities with budget crises. 

Answering a final question about their degree of optimism for the short legislative session, Rayfield said he couldn't do his work without a sense of optimism. What unites us, he added, is a desire to tackle big issues. Helfrich likened their relationship to an extended family with whom you hope you have a good relationship.

Rayfield said, "Am I the crazy uncle?" 

Election workers deserve our thanks in these divisive times

We should be thankful all of the time, not just around Thanksgiving.

But it was auspicious timing for the Salem City Club to have an "Elections Under the Microscope" presentation last Friday, since I came away from the presentations by Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess and Polk County Clerk Kim Williams with an increased feeling of thankfulness for the often thankless job election workers do in these divisive times.

Bill Burgess

By divisive, naturally I'm referring to the indisputable fact that one of our two major national political parties, the Republican, is in the thrall of Donald Trump, a notorious election denier since to this day he continues to falsely claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

In addition to describing how their offices function, Burgess and Williams spoke about how the threats, intimidation, and baseless claims of election fraud being directed at election workers is creating a lot of stress. 

Williams is new to her position as Polk County Clerk following the resignation of her predecessor, Val Unger, last September. In Burgess' slide presentation, he shared this description of what Unger faced after the 2020 election.
Things have gotten worse since.

Burgess described instances of recent threats against election workers in Oregon, including a letter containing white powder sent to the Lane County election office. The Postal Service notified Burgess to look for a similar letter sent to the Marion County election office. It was discovered before being delivered to the office.

There's simply no reason to be concerned about the integrity of elections in Oregon. Our vote by mail system is highly secure. Fraud is almost nonexistent.

Here's the slides from Burgess' presentation that describe the procedures used to make sure that every ballot is counted accurately. Hopefully I've gotten them in the right order (these are scans I made from a printed handout that didn't have slide numbers).

It begins with the ballot envelope that a voter signs. The bar code contains an ID number for each ballot. So once a ballot has been returned, there's no way another ballot with that number can be counted. Here's what happens after a ballot has been received. Under each image I'll repeat the text, since it is kind of small to read in the slides.

A unique ID # on each ballot return envelope records voter ballot returns statewide. The signature is verified before the envelope can be opened. Verified return envelopes are sorted by precinct. Envelopes with signature issues are set aside awaiting signature verification "cure " by voter within 21 days after election to be opened and counted.

Opening boards, comprised of Election Board Workers from different parties remove the ballot, security sleeve and other contents from the ballot return envelope. Any empty ballot return envelope is noted. The ballot return envelope is stored in a blue bin. The ballot goes to the pre-inspection board.


This room is not connected to the internet. Ballots are scanned. Teams of two EBWs [Election Board Workers] review images to assure voter intent is recorded. For instance, did the voter really vote for two candidates, or did they cross out one or otherwise indicate their choice? Results are transported outside the secure counting room by a clean USB drive to be posted on the internet.

In Oregon and Ohio, a good day for democracy

Fans of democracy -- and it's a sad commentary on our politics that this doesn't include everybody -- are heartened by what happened here in Oregon and there in Ohio today.

On the home front, I was thrilled when a notification from the Oregonian popped up on my iPhone saying that our Secretary of State had issued the correct ruling on whether ten state senators who took part in a lengthy walkout during the 2023 legislative session could run for office again.

Here's an excerpt from "Republican senators who boycotted work can't run for reelection, secretary of state rules."

Ten Republican and Independent senators who participated in a six-week walkout this spring won’t be allowed to run for reelection, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade announced Tuesday.

Griffin-Valade wrote that she views voter-approved Measure 113 as disqualifying Oregon lawmakers who received 10 or more unexcused absences during the 2023 legislative session from running for reelection in 2024.

That was clearly what voters intended, even though wording of the full text of the measure said absentee lawmakers couldn’t run in the election “after” their term, whereas lawmakers run for reelection about two months before their terms end. Ballot language and media coverage all communicated to voters that the punishment for absences would impact lawmakers in their next term, not a later one.

“It is clear voters intended Measure 113 to disqualify legislators from running for reelection” to a term immediately following the one in which they have 10 or more unexcused absences, Griffin-Valade said in a statement. “My decision honors the voters’ intent by enforcing the measure the way it was commonly understood when Oregonians added it to our state constitution.”

She said she directed the Oregon Elections Division not to accept reelection filings from any lawmaker who skipped that much work.

Clearly this was the correct decision, though Republicans surely will ask a court to overturn the Secretary of State. Good luck with that. As noted in the Oregonian story, there was no dispute about what Measure 113 would do prior to the vote on it in the November 2022 election.

But now Oregon Republicans want to further burnish their credentials as our state's anti-democracy party.

First they undermined the will of voters who elected Democratic majorities in both the state House and Senate by preventing legislation from moving forward during their six-week walkout, which prevented the Senate from having the two-thirds quorum needed to be in session.

Now they're planning to attempt to undermine the will of the 68% of Oregon voters who approved Measure 113 via a legal challenge to the Secretary of State's ruling on what that law requires. This is typical of Republican politicians these days: when they lose an election, they don't try harder to convince voters to vote for GOP candidates and positions, they attempt to weaken democracy.

Republicans have been doing the same thing in Ohio.

After supporters of reproductive freedom announced that they'd seek to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2023 ballot guaranteeing women in Ohio the right to choose to have an abortion, and polls showed the amendment was likely to pass, the GOP-controlled legislature ignored a recently passed law that did away with August elections.

August, after all, is in the midst of summer when many people aren't paying attention to politics, so the turnout typically is low.

Which is just what Ohio Republicans wanted, since their scheme was to put a proposal on the August 8 ballot (the only thing on the ballot) that would change the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment from a simple majority of the voter to 60%.

They were open about their motivation for doing this: to markedly reduce the chance that Ohio voters would approve the constitutional amendment legalizing abortion, which currently is illegal in Ohio. The proposal also would make it considerably more difficult to obtain the required signatures to put an amendment on the ballot.

Well, today we learned how Ohio voters felt about that Republican attempt to subvert democracy. The proposal failed, big time. With 97% of the vote in, Issue One is failing 43% to 57%. 

There's no guarantee that Ohio voters will approve the constitutional amendment legalizing abortion in November, but now it sure seems likely that the amendment will pass, given that every time abortion has been on the ballot since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion rights have scored a victory.

Americans don't like having rights taken away from them. Especially the right to a free and fair democracy.

Here's the dumbest thing Oregon Republicans did this legislative session

Stupidity isn't limited to one political party, for sure. There's plenty of dumb moves made by both Democrats and Republicans. 

But I've got to give the award for the most egregious display of political cluelessness in the Oregon legislative session that concluded yesterday to four Republican senators and one independent, who I assume was Brian Boquist, as he used to be a Republican.

For even though the six-week walkout by Senate Republicans had ended after Democrats agreed to water down two bills dealing with abortion and gun control, those five senators didn't attend the last day of the session yesterday, Sunday, June 25.

As the Oregonian reports in "Oregon bill to accelerate housing development with change to urban growth boundaries fails by 1 vote," their absence doomed House Bill 3414, a Republican priority.

A contentious bill to increase Oregon’s supply of affordable housing failed Sunday by a single vote in the waning hours of the 2023 legislative session as five lawmakers who might have supported it remained out of the building.

House Bill 3414, introduced at the request of Gov. Tina Kotek, sought to accelerate housing development by streamlining planning and permitting, allowing variances to a variety of building requirements, and establishing a new state office to hold local jurisdictions accountable for meeting their communities’ housing needs.

The key, controversial provision added in recent days also would have allowed cities to expand their urban growth boundaries by up to 150 acres to accommodate more housing, provided some of it was highly affordable, without the usual process.

...The bill had unanimous support from Republicans present for the vote Sunday, but fell one vote short of the 16 it needed to pass the Senate on a day when four Republican lawmakers and one independent were absent following their walkout this session. Ten Democrats in the Senate also opposed the bill.

This was a golden opportunity for Republicans to pass a bill that weakened Oregon's land use system, which is much beloved by Democrats and environmentalists who favor strong urban growth boundaries the protect farm and forest land from unnecessary development. 

But I guess the four Republican senators and one independent were so enamored with their previous walkout -- which was the longest in Oregon history and the second longest in the nation -- that they couldn't resist staying away from their legislative duties until the session ended.

Since House Bill 3414 was supported by homebuilders, realtors, and chambers of commerce, who are typically backers of Republican candidates, I suspect those five senators who tanked the bill by their absence on Sunday are going to hear some well-deserved criticism from their usual allies.

Though House Bill 3414 had a laudable aim, increasing the supply of affordable housing, throwing in the one-time 150 acre exemption from land use laws in order to expand the urban growth boundary in cities outside of the metro area at the last moment wasn't a smart move either. 

Probably this was done as part of the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans that ended the walkout. Likely House Bill 3414 would have passed if that exemption hadn't been added as an amendment.

However, it would have passed with the amendment if those five conservative senators hadn't grandstanded one day too long, extending their walkout through the last day of the session when just one vote from any of them would have enabled House Bill 3414 to pass.