The gavel came down on this year’s session of the Oregon legislature on Friday. Legislators failed to pass a controversial funding package for transportation and infrastructure. They also took up gun bills, civil commitment, wildfire funding and many other issues. OPB political reporter Dirk VanderHart helps us understand it all.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today on YouTube as well. You can watch this conversation at opb.org/livestream. The Oregon Legislature’s regular 2025 session ended late Friday night, but it wasn’t exactly regular. Democrats had supermajorities in both chambers, meaning they could pass tax increases without a single Republican vote, and they had a Democratic governor who was eager to sign bills that furthered her agenda. And yet, the session ended without the passage of the Democrats’ key agenda item: a transportation package.
Dirk VanderHart is a member of OPB’s political reporting team. He joins us now to talk about what passed in Salem this year and what did not. Dirk, great to see you again.
Dirk VanderHart: Fantastic to be here.
Miller: We should start by talking about this transportation package. We talked about it before the session even began. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it was the single biggest bill the Democrats said they were going to pass. And they didn’t get it across the finish line.It was a spectacular failure. So we should start with this: Can you remind us, first, what this bill would have done?
VanderHart: Yes, and bear with me, it would have done a lot. There were a couple different versions. It was an attempt, really, not just to raise a lot of money for the state’s roads, but also to fundamentally shift how we pay for roads moving forward. Obviously, a huge piece of it was taxes. We have a 40 cents-per-gallon gas tax here. It would have raised it by either 15 cents or 12 cents, depending on the version you’re looking at. One of them would have also indexed it to rise with inflation.
There were taxes on car sales for people, that got a lot of people riled up, higher registration entitling fees. There was a transit tax that we all pay out of our paychecks that would have increased. And crucially, this would have begun requiring drivers of EVs and hybrids to pay for every mile they drive, as opposed to paying a fuel tax, just to make sure that those folks are sustainably paying into the roads. This would have raised a lot of money, as I say. At its height, the most expensive version we saw would have raised $2 billion a year [which] would have been spent on nuts and bolts road projects, but also major highway projects that we talked about, public transit – just a big, big bill. And the big picture is advocates said this would have solved major structural deficiencies in how the state pays for roads for years to come. They were saying, this is the answer, folks, get on board.
Miller: Why did it fail?
VanderHart: I mean, a lot of reasons, I would say. One is a fairly bewildering timing decision by leadership, where an actual bill wasn’t unveiled or introduced until June 9, less than three weeks before the lawmakers or legislators had to adjourn. The bottom line was Republicans didn’t like the tax hikes here and not enough Democrats were for it. So, new tax bills, you said this up at the top, in Oregon need a three-fifths supermajority in each chamber to pass. Democrats, as it happened, have exactly that margin in each chamber ...
Miller: If everybody is there.
VanderHart: That’s correct. Essentially no margin for error for Dems if Republicans were going to be on board. It became clear early this week that, particularly in the Senate, the bill couldn’t pass. So Democrats tried this last minute gambit on the last day of session. It was very dramatic. They said, we can’t get what we want across, we’re going to try to just pass a 3-cent hike to the gas tax that’s gonna maybe help us avoid laying off a bunch of people at ODOT. That failed, too, because Republicans said no, you’re not going to get our permission to fast track a vote on that.
Miller: Is there any precedent for something like this? For the majority party to fail to pass its signature priority?
VanderHart: There is, and plenty in the last decade. Actually, in 2015, when Kate Brown was governor, they wanted to pass a transportation package, couldn’t find agreement. Some things unraveled toward the end of session and they had to scrap it. We wound up passing a transportation package two years later in 2017, so that might be instructive here.
But also, in 2019 and 2020, Democrats really wanted to pass a cap and trade program. Republicans walked out. There were some other difficulties, so they didn’t get that across either. So it happens.
Miller: How much second-guessing or finger pointing have you been hearing among Democrats?
VanderHart: There’s definitely some of that. This is a bill that really tested the party. It was supported by most Democrats, but the folks on the progressive edge wanted more money. They wanted us to be funding vehicle electrification, and transit even more, and more bike and walk projects. And then you had more centrist folks, particularly folks in Clackamas County, who are really the Democrats who often have the more swingier seats, saying, this is way too expensive. We can’t sell this to our voters.
One Democrat, Annessa Hartman from Gladstone, took to Instagram at one point and called it insane tax increases, while she was in a fit of pique over something. Senator Mark Meek, though, toward the end of session, was the poster child for this. He is a Democrat from Gladstone. He was saying, I will not support this, and toward the end, actively started taking to social media to defeat the bill, not just saying, I won’t support it, but we need to kill this bill.
Miller: I should say we’re going to have him on the show tomorrow to hear what he has to say about this now that the bill has been killed. What have you heard from Republicans?
VanderHart: I have sat through a lot of adjournments in the legislature and typically the last day is not very pleasant for the minority party because they have fought some fights and they’ve lost. They’re watching a lot of bills that they opposed move forward.
This time I was sitting by Republicans and they were downright chipper. They had notched a big, big win in getting this thing killed, though they were pretty forceful in saying Democrats were the ones that dropped the ball, we’re just not going to help them pick it back up.
They had argued against hiking taxes for transportation the whole time. I think Democrats probably expected they could pick a few more of them off at the end of the day. Sometimes there’s money in the budget bill you’re able to wheel and deal. It just didn’t happen. So I think Republicans are feeling good. I think, though, they do acknowledge this is not a solved problem. They know that we need more money for roads, that ODOT is going to have a budget hole, so that remains.
Miller: What did the governor say about this over the weekend?
VanderHart: She is not pleased with pretty much anyone. She said essentially, Republicans are lazy. They just wanted to go home. They should have helped us waive the rules and fast-tracked this 3-cent gas tax increase because there were the votes there. She also strongly suggested she’s not very happy with Democratic leaders. She said, “It’s Saturday, my team is working, where is the legislature?” I think the takeaway I took from that is the legislature could have worked for two more days. They opted to adjourn and not battle it out. I think she would have liked to see that battle.
Kotek, I would say, has not been intimately engaged with this transportation discussion this year. She says she’s been working behind the scenes, but I think most people think that she was kind of checked out on it. She’s been focused on other things. She did rush to the capitol on Friday to try to twist some arms, convince some folks to pass this 3-cent gas tax increase. It didn’t work out. So now she’s saying, look, we have a structural problem with ODOT’s budget. I may have to lay off a bunch of people and I may be calling you back into session. Lawmakers, expect to hear from me. I don’t care about your vacation plans.
Miller: But, as we’ve talked about in the past, governors in general – and most governors have a lot of legislative experience, as does Kotek – they only call for special sessions if they have a good sense that they have the votes lined up for whatever bill they’re calling folks back in for. If it were easy to line those votes up, this bill would have passed in the regular session. So what’s actually in play right now?
VanderHart: It’s not clear. I mean, what we can say is, Kotek said on Saturday, I had the votes for a 3-cent tax increase. If the Republicans would have played ball, I could have got enough of them to get this over the finish line, or Democrats might have done it.
So it’s possible, if she did call them into special session, maybe they’d be taking up something minor like that. Now, I would expect it to be a little bigger, because that 3-cent tax increase made a lot of people angry because it cut cities and counties out of the funding picture completely. It would only have been for ODOT. That infuriated a lot of people who’ve been really, really engaged in that process.
My expectation is, if they come back to the table for a special session, we’re going to see something a bit more ambitious than 3 cents, but I can’t call what it might be.
Miller: Let’s talk about the opposite here. If the governor says, all right, we’ll just wait until next year or the long session in two years, what would that actually mean for roads, bridges and transportation projects?
VanderHart: It is such an interesting question and I don’t think we know. I mean, I think if we wait until 2027, probably we are in a fairly dire place. She’s saying, I’m going to have to lay off all these essential workers. We’re talking about road striping, plowing the mountain passes, filling potholes. We’re talking about responding when you break down on the highway… a lot of stuff.
But the question I have right now is, how truly imminent and dire these layoffs that she says she’s going to begin this week are. If you talk to legislators, they’d say this is a two-year budget. ODOT has money to paper over, maybe, some holes in the short term while we figure out a long-term process. So can we get a special session done? Could we even wait until 2026 and figure it out in the short session? Those questions are not clear to me. I know ODOT right now is bracing for some pretty heavy cuts, though.
Miller: All right, so we started with this huge package that did not pass, but obviously a lot of things did. One of them would change some of the state’s gun laws. What will Senate Bill 243 do?
VanderHart: Yes, this was an omnibus gun bill. We often see this in Salem. They don’t want to fight over a bunch of gun bills. They rope it into one. So, 243 bans bump stocks, these devices that turn semi-automatic weapons into essentially automatic weapons. It frees up local governments to ban guns in their public buildings.
Right now, if you have a concealed carry permit, you can carry a gun in a building, even if there is a gun ban – this changes that. And then it implements Measure 114. Remember, voters in 2022 passed this law that bans high-capacity magazines, requires a permit to purchase guns. There was a legal fight there that has now been resolved. So this bill says, [Measure] 114 is going into effect in March.
Miller: Two years ago, a gun bill was one of the reasons that Republican lawmakers walked out of Salem. That didn’t happen this year. The only sort of walkout or boycott happened in response to the way a Democratic lawmaker addressed a Republican colleague in a committee hearing. And this, too, was tied to the transportation package we were talking about. What happened?
VanderHart: This was toward the end of the transportation fight. I think temperatures were running high. People have been working at this a long time. What happened was a state representative named Shelly Boshart Davis, a Republican from Albany, was going pretty hard against the package, saying Democrats had not had a good process. This was kind of a shameful exercise. I can’t remember her exact wording, but she was actually cribbing another lawmaker’s verbiage on it. I can’t remember what she said, but another lawmaker on the committee, Senator Chris Gorsek, took offense. He said, stop it. You’re impugning the people who’ve worked on this bill. You need to be quiet. And really forcefully spoke over her. She would later say he lunged at her. I don’t know if that’s quite right. He may have pointed, but she took exception to this.
She’s filed a workplace complaint and Republicans promptly said, this is not OK, Gorsek needs to suffer some consequences and some of us, at least, are not going to show up for the floor session afterward.
Miller: Let’s turn to some other policy bills. I should point out that we’re going to dig deeper later this hour into what happened with bills about housing and the environment, but what did lawmakers do in response to the ongoing public defender crisis?
VanderHart: Their main role this year was really to pass a budget that would enable the people working on that most closely to do their work. The state’s public defense commission has a new director, it’s Ken Sanchagrin. He says, I have a plan for this really worrisome problem that Oregon has, which is that when people are charged with crimes they are constitutionally guaranteed a lawyer. We are not providing those lawyers. We don’t have enough. Sometimes people are sitting in jail without lawyers, but more often they’re sitting without lawyers, and they’re just waiting and waiting.
We have been getting worse and worse on this issue over the past years, despite a lot of attention, a number of plans, and a lot of money being thrown at this. Now we say, we got a little more money for it and we have a director that may have a plan. So let’s just fund that and hope for the best. I think that’s about where it stands at this point.
Miller: You did a lot of reporting on a bill to change the way civil commitment works in Oregon. Can you remind us what the problem is that some lawmakers had identified that they aimed to solve with a bill that they did pass – House Bill 2005?
VanderHart: Yeah, and this bill actually wound up being a mashup of a number of different proposals around the behavioral health system. The one I was most focused on was the standards the state has for committing people with serious mental illness into hospital care, essentially forcing people to get help when they can’t accept it.
For years, there’s been criticism that our rules are too strict, that it makes it harder and harder for judges to say, yes, this person needs to be in the hospital. Let’s lower those hurdles and make sure people get into the system sooner, rather than when it becomes truly, truly dire.
But the bill also attempted to address how Oregon handles people with criminal charges who have mental illness. The state was found in contempt recently because it’s not getting those folks into the state hospital quickly enough. Now we have to hustle to figure out how we do it better, so this sets some timelines that aim to move people through the system. They are interconnected but also a little different, and it’s just a very complex bill.
Miller: What happened with child welfare bills?
VanderHart: I would say a lot of drama. The governor had a child welfare bill that she really wanted. It would have changed and set some standards around when kids can be kept in seclusion, when they can be restrained. And it also would have resumed a practice that OPB has reported a lot about over the years, which was sending foster kids to facilities out of state.
This bill raised concerns from some top Democrats who work on child welfare issues, who didn’t like the direction it was going, and it ultimately died. And maybe not so coincidentally, Governor Kotek then vetoed a couple of other child welfare bills that passed with broad support. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember all the details of those, but she said, I don’t think these are the answers either. I’m going to veto these.
The Senate took exception to that. They indicated they were ready to override one of those bills and voted to do so, but the House ultimately punted on that question. So, a bunch of child welfare bills essentially died because no one could agree how we should address the problems with the system.
Miller: So the governor didn’t get her child welfare bill passed. She was not able to convince her own Democratic colleagues to get a transportation package across the finish line. How would you grade her session?
VanderHart: It’s unquestionably a mixed session for the governor. We have known since she took office in 2023, she has three main focuses: housing and homelessness, behavioral health issues, and schools. And I think she can point to some successes in all three of those areas.
She passed a law forcing accountability on school districts that get state funding. At the same time, the legislature, as it often does, passed a record school’s budget of $11.4 billion. She pressed a bill extending the ability to build so-called middle housing to expand the housing options people have in the state amid this housing crisis. But she was also forced to accept a lot less money for some of her priorities than she wanted, including for things like rent assistance and shelter, things that she is really adamant are key answers or are things we need to do to address the housing crisis.
And I would just say, on a lot of other things, I think people saw her as absent. I mentioned transportation – she was not intimately involved in those discussions earlier – but also wildfire. I think there were a couple big areas where she said, all right, lawmakers, be lawmakers, find me answers to these questions and I’ll sign them or look at them.
Miller: What did lawmakers do in terms of wildfire prevention?
VanderHart: Well, they came into the session with very ambitious hopes to find long and sustaining funding for wildfires. Remember, at the end of last year, we had to come into special session because we had a bunch of unpaid bills for wildfire. And we just don’t have the kind of money coming in routinely to pay for both preventing wildfires and also fighting them when they emerge.
So we had all sorts of ideas talked about all through the session to fund. There was a 5-cent tax on beverage containers. There was also raiding or pulling back some of the kicker – I’m adopting some of the language that some people might use for that – to create a sustainable fund. What they ultimately did was kind of a last minute suggestion, which is they slapped a new tax on ZYN pouches, a product that’s not currently taxed in the state.
Miller: Those are like tobacco pouches you put in your mouth.
VanderHart: Yeah, nicotine pouches that people use. I’m not super familiar with how they work, I’ll be honest, but 65 cents for a pack of 20 is now the tax. They also scraped a little money off the top of the rainy day fund. And that is now the sustainable half step we are taking, at least to fund programs that help people deal with mitigating wildfires.
We don’t have an answer, though, for how we’re going to pay for this wildfire season – which, by the way, has already begun.
Miller: There was some last minute drama about a potential change to the implementation of a campaign finance law that is set to go into effect in 2027, this passed a couple of years ago. This drama was spurred by a letter from the Secretary of State Tobias Read. What did he tell lawmakers, sort of at the last minute?
VanderHart: They asked him, with very little time left in the session, what’s going on with campaign finance? What do you need? What are the problems?
He came back with a very detailed letter that essentially said, well, the law you passed in 2024 contains all these ambiguities that we were not able to address through rulemaking. So we need you to come and tell us what some of this stuff means. And only then are we going to be able to order a computer system, essentially, that can help make sense of the rules, and make them comprehensive and comprehensible to Oregonians.
He said, without some of these changes – and by the way, a lot more money – I think when this law kicks in in 2027, Oregonians are gonna be pretty disappointed with what we have because we’re gonna have to use some gum, some duct tape and slap something together. So, basically, lawmakers, give me a lot more money and let’s think about delaying this thing while we figure stuff out.
Miller: And that’s what House Minority Leader Christine Drazan put forward an amendment to do, to have this delayed until 2031. But that didn’t go forward. So what happens now?
VanderHart: That was fought really, really hard by the groups that have pushed for campaign finance regulations for years and years. [They] said, look, we know you don’t like these, lawmakers, but don’t kick the can down the road like this. This is tantamount to deception.
What happens now is frankly not clear to me and something I’m going to be looking into in the coming days. This has to move forward with rules that are put into place, I think, by September. Meanwhile, the legislature, which said all session it was going to pass a law of all these technical fixes to the campaign finance rules, didn’t act. They didn’t do anything.
So I think they are expecting they will now act in the February short session, but that may create some problems in the near term. I think I’m still trying to understand what the fallout might be.
Miller: What’s another high profile bill that caught your attention this session?
VanderHart: One we paid a lot of attention to, I think maybe one of the most high-profile bills of the session, was Senate Bill 916. This was the bill that will make Oregon the first state in the nation to grant unemployment checks to both public and private sector workers when they strike. Currently, I think three states have a law like this, including Washington, which passed this law this year. We are the only ones that would do it for public sector workers.
It got a huge amount of debate. It got a ton of pushback from local governments, from school districts that say this could really be devastating for them. But it was heavily, heavily pushed by some of the public sector unions in the state. And ultimately, Democrats went along with them saying, this is a law that we think, when workers strike, is going to give them some stability, so they’re not forced to take a deal that is bad for them just because they are not able to make ends meet. A very important, I think, discussion around the nation right now.
Miller: Speaking of that, earlier in our conversation we talked about the possibility of the governor calling a special session to bring lawmakers back to pass some version of an increase in transportation funding. But there’s another possibility for a special session. If there are massive federal cuts to health care, if the U.S. Senate passes a version of the bill that the House passed a month or so ago, what might that mean for the Oregon Legislature?
VanderHart: It is clear that if some of these cuts as contemplated were to pass, we would be staring at huge funding holes that the legislature would have to come and try to grapple with, or cut services. I mean, we have seen this bill change and now it has been reduced, so I think there is some confidence from lawmakers that it’s not going to be quite as dire as it might be, but we just haven’t seen a plan from Democrats on this, really anyone.
They said, we’re going to have to cross that bridge when it comes. We’re gonna pass a budget based on what we know and then be ready in case cataclysm comes. But they’ve taken no more proactive steps that I’m aware of.
Miller: What do you think you’re gonna most remember from this session?
VanderHart: I’ve never seen chaos or collapse like we saw on the final day of session, or the scrambling in the hours of waiting as Democrats tried to piece together what they might do to salvage some piece of a transportation package. I think that is absolutely going to be what this session is remembered for, at least that’s how I feel right now.
But, more broadly, I think it’s what that cataclysm of that bill spoke to, which is something we’ve been talking about all session; the feeling in the building that there was an absence of leadership, an absence of direction to this legislature, that had a lot of people wondering much of the session, what’re we doing? And then at the end of the session, when it became clear that these things were really going to fail, I think people were just gobsmacked.
Miller: Dirk, thanks very much.
VanderHart: My pleasure, as always.
Miller: Dirk VanderHart is one of the members of OPB’s political reporting team.
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