Legislative Ag update 6/7

Legislative Update
By Oregonians for Food and Shelter,

The Legislature is continuing to figure out how to tie up loose ends in the final weeks of the session. Those loose ends are pretty major, including determining how to cobble together a proposal for road maintenance and other transportation needs, finding a sustainable way to cover wildfire costs, and finalizing a budget with limited surplus revenue. Several of the ideas on the table would require tax increases or raiding the kicker, and thus would need bipartisan votes, which seems like a long shot.

Amongst this late-stage work, OFS continues to closely track a few major natural resource issues. The Governor’s team is working on two major water bills (albeit, neither has had a substantive vote out of committee). SB 1153 would make significant changes to the water transfer statutes, including adding a new public interest review for certain transfers. Earlier this week, the Senate Rules committee published (and deleted) several amendments, ultimately delaying any vote until next week. Ag groups and others continue to oppose this bill, with close to 2,000 pieces of testimony in the docket, the vast majority of which oppose.

OFS has been closer to the water quality bill, SB 1154 which, like SB 1153, has only been worked on by small groups in direct talks with the Governor’s team. We’re cautiously optimistic that SB 1154 will be amended to address most of our concerns, but neither bill has received significant legislative or public input, and time is short to ensure these bills are drafted correctly and don’t have intended or unintended consequences for individuals or businesses.

In other news, we expect several bills to pass one or both chambers next week including the pesticide registration fee increase we opposed (HB 2809) and the renewed school IPM bill (HB 2684), which we worked to amend to relieve school districts from unattainable pesticide review and updating requirements.

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