How lawmakers are preparing for Oregon’s legislative session

Oregon’s legislative session is set to begin on Tuesday. Lawmakers will consider a slew of bills on issues such as housing, infrastructure, mental health care and more. House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, and House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, join us to share their parties’ priorities for the upcoming session.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon’s 83rd Legislative Assembly will start its 2025 session on Tuesday. At this point, the top issues they are expected to take up have become familiar: housing and homelessness, transportation, education, behavioral and mental healthcare. And of course, there’s also the one thing they have to do under the state constitution: pass a budget.

We wanted to get a preview of where Democrats and Republicans stand at the start of this session, so we called up the party’s respective leaders in the State House of Representatives. Democrat Julie Fahey is the Speaker of the House. She represents West Eugene and Veneta. Christine Drazan is the Republican leader. She represents Canby, Estacada, Sandy and parts of unincorporated Clackamas County. We talked earlier this week.

I started by asking Drazan for her big picture take on how the state is doing.

Christine Drazan: Oregon’s struggling. I am hearing from Oregonians every day that they are worried, and the issues that they are worried about right now are the everyday stuff. I mean, we’ve been talking about affordability for a long time, but here at home, it’s just not letting up just yet. And we are concerned from folks about quality of life, and addiction and homelessness continues. It’s been years now and those conversations are continuing as well. And education. I mean, I’m a mom of three, and people talk to me all the time about their experience with their kids in school. So that continues to be a struggle, that continues to be an issue that we’ve got to solve and that we need to take a lot more seriously than we have in recent years.

Miller: It’s really striking because with some variation for language here and there, I would say that the three big issues you just brought up – affordability, which is connected to housing costs; addiction, behavioral health, mental health; and education – are the three priorities that the governor has talked about in her campaign and the entirety of her time as governor. It’s interesting to hear, even if you have different ideas of solutions, that the top three issues you’re talking about are the same.

Julie Fahey, what about you? I mean, what’s your big picture take on how Oregon is doing right now?

Julie Fahey: My big picture take is that we’ve made real significant progress, but there’s more work to do. So on things like housing, homelessness, behavioral health care and education, as we talked about, we have made big progress in the legislature. We’ve made investments and policy changes, and I’ve seen real meaningful changes in outcomes, particularly on homelessness in the last few years. But we still have more work to do and we need to keep up the pressure.

And I think your point about how the priorities that Leader Drazan laid out – around affordability, schools, homelessness and other pieces – do line up with what you’ll hear out of the Democratic caucus in this legislative session, is really good news. And I think it’s a signal that both parties are really listening to what Oregonians want us to work on. And Oregonians are being very clear about what their priorities are right now. So I think we are aligned on those higher level priorities, as we have been in a couple of the more recent sessions as well. And my Republican colleagues may have some different ideas about how we get there, but I really think that we can all agree that we’ve got to step up for the people that we serve on these key issues.

Miller: I want to play both of you a few clips from the governor’s state of the state address. I think these will not be new to you since I imagine you were both there. Christine Drazan, you were part of the Republican response afterward. But for a lot of our listeners, they probably did not listen to the state of the state address because most people all around the country do not listen to their governor’s state of the state addresses [laughter]. But they’re a good encapsulation of some of the governor’s overarching priorities and the way she is talking about addressing these various issues.

This is part of what she had to say about housing production and homelessness.

Governor Tina Kotek [recording]: I am impatient about the pace of progress, and some days, just pretty angry that we’re in this predicament at all and that we can’t move faster to get more housing built. So please, my friends, let’s do more. Let’s be bolder. Let’s build more housing.

Miller: Christine Drazan, what do you think it will take to make more actual progress on increasing the number of units being built in Oregon every year?

Drazan: What’s interesting to me about the clip you just played is that housing has been her number one priority since she entered the legislature more than a decade ago, certainly in the last two years as governor. So if she’s angry, she needs to be looking in the mirror because she has added to the regulatory burden, the cost and the limitations that we faced through the years. And at the same time, she’s thrown billions of dollars at this challenge every two years.

So the solutions for where we go, for how we get more housing, it’s got to be to have a conversation that no one has been willing to have, which is to have Oregonians in the room together and to say, in our own collective opportunities there: What are our values? What do we care about? We have to protect farmland. We need more housing. Let’s stop doing the one-off, let’s stop doing the exceptions. Let’s begin to approach this conversation in a much more strategic way.

I have to push back just a little bit on this idea that we have made progress, in particular on homelessness. We haven’t. We’ve certainly spent a lot of money. Spending money hasn’t resulted in a reduction in the number of people sleeping on our streets. We are eighth in the nation for a total number of people on our streets, almost 23,000. Just to put that number into a perspective of Oregon broadly, we have about 214 cities across our state that have a smaller population than the number of people sleeping on our streets every single night, from our most recent point in time count. So it’s roughly the size of the city of Roseburg right now. That is shocking and it’s an increase of 13%. Billions of dollars every single year for the last two years, to see those numbers rise 13%. Then have people say we’re making progress, we’re continuing to do the work.

I would argue that we are not using the right strategies to solve this problem, and that spending money when it doesn’t actually result in the outcomes you are planning for, you should pivot. You should change direction, and I think that what we need is a reset.

Miller: But what is one specific policy that you would want the state to pursue, either for housing production or homelessness. But actually, I do want to stick with housing production because you said we all have to get together and we have to preserve farmland, but we need more houses. That’s not a policy though. Those are priorities.

Drazan: Those are principles. And what we’ve been doing instead of approaching this conversation with principals is we’ve been writing a lot of blank checks, and we’ve been creating a lot of mandates and exceptions to a very, very cumbersome, layered land use system. Right now, in Oregon, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to purchase a property and do anything with it. It’s extraordinary. We’re like one great big, giant homeowners association. Everybody gets to weigh in on size, shape, color, scope, trees, you name it. And it’s expensive and it’s slow.

So when I say we need to have a conversation, I’m saying that we need to actually identify priorities. And before we are able to make progress on how we are going to expedite, I would suggest that we need to revisit some of those mandates and some of those expectations. Because time is money when it comes to housing and building more housing. We have had a lot of proposals from developers and realtors, and there are actual substantive improvements we can make to our system today. We need to actually start to listen to them.

Miller: Julie Fahey, what do you think it will take to make more actual progress on housing production? I also will give you a chance to respond to Christine Drazan’s critique of where we are in terms of unsheltered homelessness. But to stick with housing production first, what would you want to prioritize?

Fahey: I think there is no one thing that we can do to solve the housing crisis in Oregon. We can trace back the challenges that we are facing to the Great Recession, where fewer units were being built in Oregon. For many years, we were able to match the number of homes that were being built with the number of people that were moving to Oregon. And then in the Great Recession with the financial crisis, we no longer were building to meet the need.

We need to build over 100,000 homes to meet the need here in Oregon. And there is no one thing that we can do to solve that. It is a very complicated, layered challenge. But I think it’s really important to talk about the work that has been done over the last seven or eight years to get us to the point we are right now. Some of that work is starting to bear real fruit.

Starting back in 2017, we made significant reforms to how you encourage accessory dwelling units, those are things like tiny homes and backyards. In 2019, we were the first state in the country to overhaul our statewide zoning codes to encourage more middle housing, like townhomes and duplexes. And starting in 2021, we made major investments in affordable housing construction and preservation. And over the last couple of years, we changed how we planned for housing in this state. We made changes to our land use system cities that need more land for housing.

Importantly, land is part of the challenge, but it’s not the challenge in every city. In some cities, like in Eugene, there is residential land within the urban growth boundary, but there wasn’t the infrastructure to serve that land to develop it. So last session, we made major investments in local infrastructure so that cities could put in water, wastewater and transportation infrastructure to build residential construction within their urban growth boundaries.

So I think there’s a big through line of all of this work that’s happened over the last eight years, and none of those things that we have done will bear fruit overnight. It all takes time, especially in the context of high interest rates. But it’s really important that we keep moving, that we keep knocking things down, cutting that red tape and moving forward, so that we can solve this challenge in Oregon.

Miller: Well, what do you see as the next thing to knock down? The biggest current impediments that are preventing at least some piece of a housing production increase?

Fahey: I think we need to keep up our investments in affordable publicly subsidized construction. That is a key piece of making sure that folks with the lowest income in Oregon are able to find housing. We’re also going to need to put a significant amount of focus into preserving the affordable housing that does exist. So the way that we finance affordable housing construction in this country includes federal tax credits that have a 30-year lifespan. Some of those tax credits are now expiring, so we need to make sure that we’re keeping the stock that we currently have.

So this session, I know we will keep up that focus. We’ve knocked down some of these major barriers over the last few years. It’s just that they take time to come to fruition.

Drazan: And I think that I just really briefly want to respond to that. What’s interesting to me about that progression of concepts is … the Speaker couldn’t see me nodding for some of that and absolutely infrastructure is a challenge in my district. The city of Sandy, in particular, must improve its wastewater facilities. It has more than adequate space in its UGB of people interested in building, they’re just prohibited from doing so at this time. So that’s true, and we have to address that. We have to help them meet those needs to build more homes.

At the same time, we have in Oregon an extraordinary tax burden. I mean, building homes is a business. And we can’t just look at this and say that the progress that we’re going to make when it comes to units is going to be publicly subsidized public housing. We don’t need tenements across our state. What we need is houses and properties that are eligible for first-time home buyers in the private market as well. And our tax environment really makes us an unattractive place for people to come and make that investment.

If you look at people that have done multi-family housing units successfully, they have not done it in the city of Portland. They have gone to the outskirts, they’ve gone to outlying communities. So you might see just a beautiful complex of apartments in Oregon City, which we’re grateful to have. And also, that’s not necessarily on a MAX line, it might be on a bus line. So we’re not necessarily achieving density in Portland proper. We are going out to the outskirts, we’re going out to the suburbs – that creates congestion.

I think when you hear the Speaker and the governor potentially talk about the need for middle housing and all this full range of housing options, I want to put first time home buyers in the center of that conversation. I want to say we still need for this to be something that pencils for the businesses that do this work. And right now, with our tax burden and our regulatory environment, that’s kind of tough.

Miller: Julie Fahey, your response?

Fahey: I think that this is an issue. It’s so interesting with us listening to each other. This is an issue where there is significant agreement between Democrats and Republicans. It’s one of the reasons why housing supply has been an issue that I have really put a lot of focus on in my time in the legislature, dating back to when I was chair of the housing committee. We need to build more housing. Almost no one is arguing with that. Some of the solutions here and there … How far do we push our land use system? How far do we push our cities on permitting? There’s some differences around the margin there, but it has been an issue that has been strongly bipartisan and where I do think that we agree. It’s also been an issue where we need to do all of the above.

Sometimes I hear people say, well, we shouldn’t do that. Why are you doing this instead of this? And my approach to that is, we need to do all of the above. Yes, we need publicly subsidized affordable housing, and we need the private market to step up and also do their part to help us address this challenge.

Miller: Julie Fahey, I want to give you a chance, briefly, to respond to what Christine Drazan said. That was in response to what you had said, which is that we’ve made real progress in terms of homelessness. As she was pointing out, if you look at unsheltered homeless numbers, it’s hard to find any numbers in recent years that are anything but dispiriting. What did you mean and where do you see meaningful progress?

Fahey: So when Governor Kotek took office, she declared a state of emergency on homelessness and worked with the legislature to help provide some additional funding to address homelessness. But the thing that I want to highlight is the difference in approach – and that was two years ago. So the difference in approach for that state of emergency and that level of funding that we allocated in 2023. And there are two things that are important there.

One was that there was a focus on outcomes. This wasn’t just, we’re going to send money out to cities, counties and nonprofits, and hope that they make progress. In order to receive this funding, the different regions in the state had to commit to how many people are they going to rehouse, how many people are they going to prevent from being evicted and how many new shelter beds are they going to create. And we met those goals that were set over the last two years. And the governor talks about, if we continue that progress over the next few months, by the end of June, we will have rehoused 3,300 households, we will have prevented 24,000 evictions and we will have created over 4,800 shelter beds. That’s really important progress that wouldn’t have happened without that focused work over the last two years.

The other thing that I will highlight about the different approach over the last couple of years, is that funding required cities, counties and nonprofits to collaborate and work together to develop a plan. That has been more challenging in some parts of the state than others. I am from Lane County, so a somewhat different experience than what you all have had up in the metro area, where the city, the county, Portland and the county have not seen eye to eye sometimes on this. But that collaboration is really important to ensure that folks are on the same page and moving in the same direction.

Miller: I want to turn to transportation – one of the issues that’s likely to take up a big chunk of your collective time when the transportation package is eventually unveiled. A bipartisan group of lawmakers toured the state, with the legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation over the summer. I haven’t yet seen a package that has been released to the public.

But broadly speaking, Christine Drazan, we can separate this package into where the money is going to come from – where new money might come from – and what it’ll be spent on. I’m gonna talk about both of those. Let’s start with the spending. What would you want to tell ODOT to focus on?

Drazan: I want ODOT to do what it’s already said it would do. Here’s my challenge with ODOT – we had legislators come together and adopt a bipartisan transportation package back in the day, all the way back in 2017. They raised taxes north of $5 billion at that time. And I went back and listened to some of those hearings, where people were saying this is going to set up transportation in Oregon for a generation. It did not do that. They did not perform. They did not fulfill their commitments to public policy makers that were willing to step up and provide that additional funding for them.

So from my perspective, I really feel strongly that this is not an agency that has earned my trust as a leader of my caucus. We certainly have transportation needs. We need to have good roads. We need to have our potholes fixed ...

Miller: Bridges that don’t fall down.

Drazan: We need bridges that do not fall down. We need the snowplows to hit the mountains in the winter, so there’s no loss of life. This is a critical function of government. And my perspective on this particular agency is that they have instead chosen to be all things to all people and satisfied potentially too many interests. And we need to have a narrowing of their mission and their focus to transporting people, goods and services across our state and ensuring that our roads are safe, instead of building pedestrian bridges endlessly, focusing on additional bike lanes, transit, and adding all these layers, all these costs and expenses.

Every single one of those things have value. Every single one of those things has a constituency. But I would say that when you have rising costs, you have inflation, and you have families saying, “I cannot afford it, I can’t afford one more thing, do not ask me to pay for one more thing right now,” it’s the time to really, really sharpen that pencil and say, “what is our priority,” make hard priority decisions. And from my perspective, safety’s number one; congestion is number two. I don’t mean congestion for purposes of pricing people off of the roads. And congestion pricing, that’s its intention. That is a feature, not a flaw. So if they did add an additional proposal around congestion pricing or tolling, that is intended to have people not get on the roads when they say so. I think that for people that can’t control when they go to work, when people that don’t have control of their lives like that, they can’t work remotely, they are especially burdened by that kind of a proposal. And I don’t think that it’s fair.

Miller: We’re getting into the spending side now.

Drazan: I can’t not, Dave

Miller: Fair enough. Let me give Julie Fahey a chance to respond. First of all, Julie Fahey, do you have trust in the Oregon Department of Transportation?

Fahey: What you asked about, what we think that Oregon, that ODOT should be focused on, I think there’s clear agreement there that Oregonians want a system that is safe, efficient and reliable. So we all know that we want to be able to get to and from school with fewer hassles. We want bridges that are safe and seismically resilient. And I think people want transportation options. That does need transit, bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

So our transportation package needs to focus on the basics of funding those things. Our revenue system for transportation is rapidly becoming outdated though, and insufficient to cover basic maintenance, operation and safety. It’s not just an Oregon …

Drazan: I think I’ll jump in on that just a little bit.

Miller: Let me give you a chance to respond after she finishes making her point.

Drazan: Thank you.

Miller: Julie Fahey.

Fahey: I just want to make the point that that’s not a problem that’s unique to Oregon or to ODOT. That is a problem that every state in the nation is facing right now, that the gas taxes are no longer sufficient to cover the basic needs around operations, maintenance and safety. And that is because vehicles are getting more fuel efficient, people are driving more electric vehicles. Those are good developments and they’re great news, but they do present a challenge for our transportation system that really relies heavily on those fuel taxes …

Drazan: And I apologize for jumping in on that, but I would like to say that the reason that it has become outdated is public policy decisions that we’ve made. I mean, we have affirmatively made the decision to say that we are now moving to electric vehicles, which means we’re choosing to make gas-powered vehicles obsolete. So that means that there will be a reduction in that as a revenue source and that decision before the public conversation about what revenue source are we going to go to.

Miller: Wait, are you saying that you think we should burn more gas because the revenue system that we’ve had for decades relied on gas tax?

Drazan: I’m saying we put the cart before the horse from a public policy perspective …

Miller: But that cart is about existential threats from climate change.

Drazan: And the moment that we made a decision to say that we are going to transition to electric vehicles, was the moment they should have also said electric vehicles should pay their fair share for the roads – which they never did. Electric vehicles …

Fahey: In fact, they did do that, if I can interrupt.

Drazan: Yeah. So you and I are both like, I don’t see you, so I wasn’t quite sure. But that is part of the challenge.

Fahey: In 2017, we raised registration fees for electric vehicles, when electric vehicles started to become more prominent. And then more than a decade ago, we started the process of thinking about what it would look like for vehicles to, instead of paying the gas tax, pay by the mile of what they drive and …

Drazan: Which is voluntary, not mandatory.

Fahey: It’s voluntary, not mandatory, right now. That’s correct. It’s a pilot program. And I think it’s really important that we did a pilot program to try and work out all the technology issues and make sure that we could get the program right ...

Drazan: And it’s also been for more than a decade.

Fahey: Yes, more than a decade. That is what I said. So I think one of the conversations we’ll be having this session is about, is that a funding model that we want to think about in 10, 15, 20 years? What should our funding system look like in the long-term? How can we get there, how can we step there now and in the future to modernize that funding system?

Miller: Julie, I do want to go back to get you on the record about something that Christine Drazan said, because essentially what she was saying is, I don’t trust this agency to be good shepherds of Oregonians’ tax money. Do you?

Fahey: I think in the transportation package conversation this session, accountability and transparency are going to be very important conversations that we have about, if we’re going to give additional resources to that agency, what are the assurances that that money is going to be spent in a responsible way? What accountability mechanisms will we build into the funding streams that we are talking about?

So in my mind, you talked about what we are spending the money on. We’ve talked a little bit about what is the source of the money. And the third leg of that stool is accountability and transparency. So we haven’t pulled the package together yet. We don’t have details worked out on each of those three legs of the stool. That work is in process right now as we speak. But it will be critically important, and there’s no chance that we pass the transportation package this session without that third leg of the stool.

Miller: I want to turn briefly to education, which is another issue that you both talked about at the beginning, another issue that the governor has said is one of her big three focuses. In her speech last week, she did talk about both rethinking the mechanism for K-12 district funding and also the system of accountability – although there weren’t a ton of specifics yet about what that means. Julie Fahey, first, what kinds of changes to K-12 policy would you like to see, would you vote for this session?

Fahey: So one of the most important responsibilities of the legislature is to fund our schools, but I believe that those investments can’t be a blank check. We have to ensure that the student outcomes in our K-12 schools are improving, and that we have concrete evidenced-based plans to get there. So this session, there will be a focus not just on ensuring sufficient resources for our schools, but on the accountability and outcomes part of that as well.

For me, there are a couple of specific things that I would like to see. One is we have, in recent years, focused more on directed spending for our school districts. What that means is the legislature has said, this is an issue where we really want school districts to invest in, whether it’s summer learning programs, or early literacy, or career and technical education. We have set aside specific pots of money for school districts to invest in those specific things. So I expect that we will continue some of that work, especially around summer learning and early literacy.

On the accountability side, one of the things that I am very excited to take up this session is, when we passed the Student Success Act, one of the programs that we stood up there was a program to help support our lowest performing districts in this state. Those districts receive intensive technical support and additional funding to try and improve their outcome. That program is voluntary, and I don’t think that our lowest performing school district in the state should be able to say “no” when the Department of Education comes and says, “Here’s these extra support and extra resources that can help you improve outcomes for your students.” So I know we’ll take up a bill about that topic this session.

Miller: Essentially, what you’re talking about is a funded mandate. “You have to do this. We will give you money, but you can’t say ‘no,’ you have to do this.”

Christine Drazan, your priorities when it comes to K-12 education this year, and then we’ve got to say goodbye.

Drazan: Oh, thank you for that. I really believe strongly that our schools are struggling right now in a way that we can solve for. But I don’t think that our current systems that I believe are in kind of a little bit of a free fall, that we can just assume that if we make tweaks around the edges that it’s really going to solve things for kids.

So the thing that I really am committed to is working in a way that keeps families and students at the center of decision making, to the extent that we can create that opportunity. It doesn’t really exist right now. And when we have conversations about education, we talk about systems, bureaucracies and mandates to districts, and how we can sort of provide accountability to this very complex system.

I just like to simplify it a little bit and say that, if we have a student that is failing and they’re in a district that is failing, that they are automatically eligible for the following interventions and supports. And that is what we’re going to fund – access for them to actually have tutoring, for them to pursue a summer school opportunity, for them to be able to, if they need to, go seek out counseling for something that’s trauma based. Who knows what that challenge might be?

I want the family to be the one that is able to make those choices affirmatively on behalf of their students. And right now, these conversations are all about systems and they’re all about systems that have more bureaucracy layered on top of them. I really feel like that’s missing the point. The point here is that individual students are failing and that individual students need to have the ability to have confidence that they will get what they need in the moment that they need it. And I do think that that will require some innovation that isn’t currently under discussion.

Miller: Christine Drazan and Julie Fahey, thanks very much to both of you.

Drazan: Thank you.

Fahey: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Christine Drazan is a Republican Leader of the Oregon House of Representatives. She represents Canby, Estacada, Sandy and parts of unincorporated Clackamas County. Julie Fahey is a Democratic Speaker of the House. She represents West Eugene and Veneta.

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