Death and Taxes

In the Oregon legislature, there’s more than one way to get rolled

When politics becomes a matter of life and death, it’s all about the money.

Could the sight of state Rep. Hòa Nguyễn, with Stage 4 cancer, appearing on the floor of the Oregon House of Representatives be enough to nudge some recalcitrant legislators to vote for a big transportation package worth roughly $15 billion in new taxes and fees?

If Nguyễn can speak of hope and energy and miracles after being absent for most of the legislative session, why can’t her colleagues show the same positive intentions about Oregon’s future?

That’s politics. In the fight to pass House Bill 2025, don’t be surprised if somebody uses it.

This year’s transportation bill has been in the works since last summer when a group of legislators called the Joint Transportation Reinvestment Committee hit the road, traveling the state and asking for the public’s input on what they wanted in transportation.

It was a rerun of the same process used to pass the last big transportation bill eight years ago — House Bill 2017. Called the “Keep Oregon Moving” bill, HB 2017 was to be the capstone of the 2017 legislative session. Then-Gov. Kate Brown insisted it had to pass.

Back then, 14 legislators serving on the Joint Transportation Modernization and Preservation Committee trooped around the state asking people and various organizations, “What are your transportation needs and wants?”

At that time, there was also the Governor’s Vision Panel on Transportation, which produced a report that factored into HB 2017.

The late Gregg Kantor was co-chair of the Governor’s Vision Panel.

“Think big…,” he told the legislative committee at one of its meetings. “Make transit statewide … blow people’s minds … Oregon is special … People move here not for the sunshine but for certain values.”

Kantor was also a board member and treasurer for the Albina Vision Trust, which wanted to cap Interstate 5 near the Rose Quarter, add housing and restore a former black neighborhood. (See Richard Cheverton’s “Runaway Train” and “Runaway Train 2: Meet the Winners.”

This is the Oregon (and Portland) way: Ask the public what they want, then behind the scenes, special-interest groups can rally supporters to show up armed with stories and data pushing a specific agenda.

Two words frequently heard at the statewide public input meetings for the 2017 transportation package were “grand bargain,” and they were often uttered by then-Sen. Rod Monroe (D-Portland).

“A grand bargain involves Democrats and Republicans coming together, the Senate and House and Governor coming together. It has to be non-referrable,” he said, meaning it had to be popular enough that opponents could not successfully refer it to the voters.

“If any big special interest is opposed … they will want to refer it to the voters, and if it is referred, it will be defeated. … It takes a lot of compromise,” Monroe liked to explain. “If something goes on the ballot, and we are going to raise your taxes this much, it will be defeated. … We need a grand bargain. It is not going to be easy.”

(A year later, Monroe, a retired teacher who owned an apartment house, would be primaried out of the legislature by Shemia Fagan, who beat him by pushing for rent control. She later got her comeuppance as Secretary of State, when she was forced to resign in disgrace, after it was discovered she was a paid consultant to a cannibas company, while her office audited the marijuana industry.)

Typically, when Oregon legislators want to protect a piece of legislation from being overturned by the voters through the initiative process, they simply attach an emergency clause to the bill, which takes away that right. But bills that raise taxes can’t have an emergency clause.

So HB 2017 ended up with something for everybody in the four corners of the state, roughly 42 projects. Everybody gave a little — hikes in the gas tax and vehicle registration fees but also taxes on new bicycle sales. One of the biggest projects was widening and improving the Rose Quarter area of I-5, which would benefit not only Portland commuters and truck drivers delivering goods but also farmers in eastern Oregon trying to transport produce.

After much political wrangling — HB 2017 finally passed. Gov. Kate Brown celebrated with five separate signing ceremonies throughout the state.

Eight years later, improvements have yet to start on the Rose Quarter. It has been stalled by racial justice fanatics seeking reparations for last century’s displacement of black residents in the Albina neighborhood during urban renewal. There were demands to “cap” a portion of the Rose Quarter freeway and treat it like developable land for black people. Gov. Brown acquiesced to this.

HB 2017 also spawned a group called No More Freeways, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is sponsored by an Oregon non-profit organization called Portland Transport. No More Freeways has been focused on stopping the Rose Quarter expansion and regularly sends people to speak out at community meetings. They came out in force against HB 2025.

That brings us to this year. Buried in the 102 pages of HB 2025 is a reference to setting aside $125 million per year into a new “Anchor Project Account.” These are “megaprojects” left over from HB 2017, and the Rose Quarter has first priority followed by the Abernethy Bridge seismic upgrades, still ongoing. Other anchor projects include I-205 widening, Newberg-Dundee Bypass freeway project, and the Center Street Bridge in Salem.

Whether or not the Rose Quarter widening ever happens, the proposed taxes and fees in HB 2025 will happen if the bill passes. The latest figure is more than $15 billion over the next 10 years as the bill is now written.

The costs to Oregonians can be significant when added up. Among them:

• Increase the state’s 40-cent-per-gallon gas tax by 15 cents and indexed to inflation for future hikes.

• Increase the driver’s skill test at the DMV from $45 to $111.

• Increase registration fee for a new car from $43 to $113.

• Electric vehicle and hybrid owners would be required to sign up for OReGo, a state program that charges drivers for miles driven instead of fuel consumption.

• Create a two percent tax on sales of new cars and a one percent tax on sales of used cars worth more than $10,000.

• Raise the payroll tax that currently funds public transit via the Statewide Transportation Improvement Fund (STIF) from 0.1% to 0.3% in a staggered increase between now and 2030.

• Increase the vehicle privilege tax rate paid by vehicle dealers for the privilege of selling vehicles in Oregon from 0.5 percent to one percent of the retail sales price of the sold motor vehicles.

All this revenue collected from vehicle-related uses would presumably go for the state’s vehicle infrastructure, which is in serious need of repair and improvements. In Oregon, that isn’t how it works.

The Rose Quarter isn’t the only project from HB 2017 that hasn’t panned out. As the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported last year, more than $70 million in public money has been spent for two rail shipping centers in the Willamette Valley and eastern Oregon to reduce truck emissions and boost agricultural exports. The two shipping centers sit idle.

This legislative session faces a constitutional deadline of June 29, and HB 2025 might not make it. Although the Democrats hold a supermajority in both the House and Senate, they need every vote because of the threshold needed to pass taxes.

HB 2025 barely made it out of the Transportation Reinvestment Committee last week when a Democrat — state Sen. Mark Meek of Gladstone announced he was voting no. The bill was too costly. He had been raising concerns all along, and they hadn’t been addressed.

State Sen. Mark Meek: “It’s not affordable to Oregonians… We are facing dire economic times.”

In response, Meek got rolled — a bit of legislative trickery that happens occasionally in Salem, where one legislator can remove another legislator at a committee meeting and cast a different vote in their place.

Senate President Rob Wagner, (D-Lake Oswego), who makes the committee assignments, removed Meek from the committee and appointed himself, voted yes and allowed HB 2025 to move on to a vote of the full House.

On Monday, the House held a third reading on HB 2025 — and immediately returned it to the committee, suggesting there will be efforts to compromise.

But there was more intrigue. Eight Republicans boycotted the House’s morning session to protest how committee co-chair Sen. Chris Gorsek (D-Gresham) had berated Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis at last week’s meeting when she complained that the public would not have time to weigh in on the final version of HB 2025.

By Monday afternoon, Wagner had removed himself from the committee and Gorsek had resigned. Wagner named new members Sens. Lew Frederick (D-N/NE Portland) and James Manning Jr. (D-Salem) and named Khanh Pham (D-SE/NE Portland) as the new co-chair replacing Gorsek.

It’s reminiscent of the last-minute wrangling of HB 2017 eight years ago. Both transportation bills were large and complicated, and so much political capital was riding on them.

Legislation is supposed to be developed and worked on in committees. By the time a bill moves to the full House and Senate, it should be well understood and ready for informed voting. That didn’t happen with HB 2017, and it’s not happening with HB 2025.

In 2010, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi famously said of the Affordable Care Act: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Her defenders maintained that her quote was taken out of context, that she had added “away from the fog of the controversy.”

But if you look at the full context when she made those remarks at the National Association of Counties’ annual Legislative Conference on March 9, 2010, in Washington D.C., she was unwittingly describing the false promises of what has become the legislative process.

Pelosi spoke eloquently about the future of health care for America, about a healthier America “where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention – it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.”

If you can dream it, turn it into words on a legislative bill and get it passed, then you can make it happen. Only then will you find out what you have really created.

Whatever the fate of HB 2025, Oregonians are going to get rolled.