[5]
By Oregonians for Food and Shelter [6],
The 2025 Oregon Legislative Session has reached its halfway point. Hundreds of bills officially died this week, and hundreds more were shipped to the budget committee. Most of the rest will make their way to the House and Senate floor.
Among OFS priority bills that died this week was HB 2679 [7], the proposed restriction on neonicotinoids. Despite many impacted stakeholders proposing a workable alternative to the introduced language, proponents were unwilling to compromise and the bill failed to receive an up or down vote.
Other bills have been moved to the Rules committees as legislators continue to work through the policy and politics. The House and Senate Rules committees are chaired and by the majority leaders and aren’t subject to deadlines. SB 1154 [8], the Governor’s sweeping groundwater protection act reform bill is one such bill. OFS led opposition [9] efforts to the proposal during a hearing earlier this week, and the bill now heads to Senate Rules (along with another concerning water transfer bill from the Governor, SB 1153 [10]), for further analysis and work.
Several other major timber and ag issues were deposited in the House Rules committees without any committee recommendation on the merits, including repeal of the statewide wildfire hazard maps (HB 3944 [11]) and the much-maligned proposal to allow farmworkers and bureaucrats to create new wages and regulations on farms (HB 2548 [12]). The Senate version of the wildfire repeal was approved and sent to Ways & Means (SB 83 [13]).
With the first chamber deadline in the rearview mirror, the Legislature will start refining the state budget, with the Ways & Means Committee in the midst of its statewide hearings [14] this month. OFS will continue to track bills referred to the Ways & Means Committee along with agency budgets and policy packages. We will also be weighing in on bills that necessitate funding to function but have no formal price tag, like the unfunded mandate requiring school districts to interpret complex pesticide statutes to come up with their own lists of pesticides that can be legally used in and around schools, HB 2684 [15].