by Julia Shumway, Oregon Capital Chronicle
December 9, 2024
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PORTLAND — Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek doubled down Monday on her requests for more funding and more attention for housing, homelessness, behavioral health and education ahead of a legislative session likely to be dominated by transportation debates.
Kotek said that people — including some of the business leaders listening to her at the Oregon Leadership Summit in the Oregon Convention Center’s Portland ballroom on Monday — have told her she picked a tough set of issues on which to stake her reputation.
“Housing and homelessness, mental health and addiction and education do not lend themselves to quick results, or, frankly, winning popularity contests,” she said.
But, she said, the state is making progress. Her $39.3 billion proposed budget includes more than $700 million intended to shelter homeless Oregonians and keep them from falling into homelessness and about $1.4 billion in bonds and infrastructure funding to help the state build its way out of a decades-long housing shortage that drove up rents and home prices. Kotek estimates that one in three Oregonians who were homeless on her first day in office will be rehoused by the end of her term in 2027 — but that would still leave about 13,000 Oregonians living on the streets or in shelters.
Her budget also includes $11.4 billion for the State School Fund, $127 million targeted toward literacy and $78.5 million for summer learning, and Kotek said on stage she “strongly encourages” legislators to maintain those figures when they finalize the state’s next two-year budget when they meet for a long session next year.
She said that an increase in funding will come with increased accountability for school districts and the state Department of Education to make sure students are improving. Kotek told the Capital Chronicle after her speech that she didn’t want to get ahead of a not-yet-released report from state education department director Charlene Williams, but said she agreed with an opinion column published in the Oregonian/OregonLive this weekend by former Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, a close Kotek ally, and former Sen. Arnie Roblan.
The column described how the 2019 Student Success Act was based on feedback from students, educators and families and requires school districts to review data. The former lawmaker wrote that districts must also set targets to improve third-grade reading, graduation rates and attendance and the state education department should step in to help struggling schools.
Other priorities
Kotek’s budget priorities will compete with other legislative initiatives, including the semi-truck in the room: the state’s transportation funding package. The Oregon Department of Transportation says it needs $2.8 billion annually — about $1.8 billion more than its current budget — just to maintain operations, leaving little for construction projects like a new bridge on Interstate 5 over the Columbia River. Kotek’s budget allocates $1.75 billion for the State Highway Fund, which she described as a minimum.
In a panel with lawmakers, state Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, said that historically the Legislature funds transportation through periodic transportation packages with lawmakers trading votes and jockeying for money for projects in their districts. This time, he said the goal is to craft a more stable plan for transportation funding as gas tax revenue continues to shrink with more electric and fuel-efficient vehicles.
“We have to have a system that’s going to be able to reliably move freight and move people across our region and across all four corners of Oregon,” Wagner said.
While lawmakers are focused on transportation, House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, said they also need to keep paying attention to housing, homelessness and behavioral health.
“We cannot just switch to the next thing,” Fahey said. “We have to maintain the work that we’re doing.”
At the last summit, at Portland’s Moda Center in 2023, Kotek and a task force she assembled to revitalize downtown Portland released a set of recommendations to fix the city’s problems with homelessness, crime and its national image. On Monday, she trumpeted news that Portland will get a new WNBA team and may be considered for a future major league baseball expansion as proof that those recommendations, which included tax breaks, more police and trash pickup, are having an impact.
But she also admonished some in the audience to “stop trash-talking” Portland.
“How we talk about this community that we live in and we love truly matters,” Kotek said. “It’s up to all of us to tell Portland’s comeback story.”
Lawmakers differ on state’s future outlook
Democratic and Republican leaders in the Oregon Legislature struck markedly different tones about the state’s economic outlook, with House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard, describing “really exciting” things he heard from business leaders and Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham saying the state’s future was as cloudy as the weather outside.
“We have a lot that we should be proud of, and what we heard from the previous presentations was we should lean into those strengths, and by leaning into those strengths, we can perform at an even higher level,” Bowman said.
Bowman acknowledged that the state faces challenges with a lack of developable industrial land and infrastructure, a challenging tax environment and workforce shortages, but said those are issues that developed over decades and will take time and work to fix. He shared a quote from retired general and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis: “Cynicism is cowardice,” and recommended a book, “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” that focuses on how government hasn’t been effective.
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity for bipartisan, collaborative work aimed at making government work better,” Bowman said. “It’s not sexy. Audits are not sexy. Implementation monitoring is not sexy, but it’s really, really important.”
Bonham, the Senate Republican leader, said Oregon’s entrepreneurs have to be determined and dynamic to overcome obstacles the state government throws their way.
“How many times do we have to hear that at this summit before we decide to go in a different direction?” he asked, saying state policies are the definition of insanity.
Rep.-elect Christine Drazan, a Canby Republican who will take over as minority leader after stepping down from the House in 2021 and losing the 2022 gubernatorial election to Kotek, said economic indicators show the state is struggling — the state’s population has declined in recent years and large companies including Intel have laid off workers.
Drazan said those should be signs that state policies haven’t worked. This should be an inflection point, she said.
“We have an opportunity to reshape, restructure and approach these challenges differently. And I am optimistic that that’s possible. I’m irrationally optimistic that that’s possible,” she said. “I also am a pragmatist, and I recognize that you have supermajorities now in the House and the Senate, and there’s no reason to ask Republicans to be a part of that conversation, other than to just have us come along with the final vote.”
Kotek said she heard and agreed with Drazan’s comments about not doing business as usual, and she has heard concerns from Republicans that Democrats’ three-fifths majorities in the House and Senate next year will lead to Republicans being left out. Supermajorities — 18 votes in the Senate and 36 in the House — will give Democrats the power to pass new taxes or increase existing ones without Republican support and make it easier for Democrats to pass other bills.
“I think the legislative leadership, the Senate president and the speaker, are very committed to being inclusive,” Kotek said. “We just have to be thinking, is everybody at the table? Is everybody having a conversation? Whether it’s transportation, housing, whatever the topic is.”
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