The smoke is still clearing from the 80th Oregon State Legislative Assembly, but if there were any open wounds left from its contentious conclusion, you wouldn’t know it by talking with House Speaker Tina Kotek.
Kotek (D-North Portland) speaks of the 2019 long session like a loving, life-long fan of the legislative process. That it began under the cloud of a sexual harassment investigation, proceeded with increasing partisan tensions in both houses, and concluded on a concession-strewn battlefield when Republicans drew their only weapon and killed the quorum is less important than what was actually proven on the field, and the promise of next season.
Kotek, now in her 12th year in the House and her fifth as speaker, has consistently declared housing and climate disruption her priorities as a lawmaker, and both played out big in this latest session as major wins and at least one notable loss. During our phone conversation late last week, Street Roots asked her how she’d grade the 2019 session against its goals.
Tina Kotek: I like to make sure everything gets done, and no, we didn’t achieve everything. I think you could say a B+ for the session for the Oregon Legislature.
There were four top priorities for this session. One was finding a new, dedicated source of funding for K-12, so we passed the Student Success Act.
We also focused on stabilizing Medicaid, so not only did we re-up our hospital and insurance investments to pay for the Medicaid gap, but we also, on the last day of session, referred a tobacco tax increase to voters next November. Those two things will help stabilize Medicaid. So we’re 2 for 2 there.
Another priority has been housing, and there have been huge accomplishments on the housing priority, which we’ll get into more later.
The fourth topic was climate – HB 2020 being the bill. What I would say there is we have an incomplete. I’ve been around long enough to know that big pieces of legislation sometimes take more than one session. The fact is that after a year’s worth of work and a lot of public conversation, we passed on the House side a carbon-pricing program that we think the state absolutely needs.
Now we have to come back and pass it through both chambers, and that will be the goal moving forward. I wouldn’t say it was a complete failure, and until we get it put into place, we’re not there, so we have to come back to that legislation. But having those four priorities, you could say we were pretty successful all the way around, even if we didn’t get that totally done.
Joanne Zuhl: While we’re on that topic, what is it going to take to get an effective climate change bill passed in this state? You had a supermajority of Democrats, but HB 2020 was derailed by actions that seemed outside of typical legislative process. What’s it going to take in the future?
Kotek: I agree with the governor and advocates that the basic bill that we have – which is a market-driven approach to putting a price on carbon, requiring big polluters to contribute – is the framework that we need to do. It is the most effective way and the best way economically for our state to move forward. So we’re not going to change that basic premise. We’re certainly going to go back and talk to more people. I think we did not do a good job of explaining the benefits to all parts of the state with that bill. There was a lot of misinformation. We did make some changes to address some concerns in rural Oregon. I don’t think they were hearing that, and we need to do more listening. I think we’ll have to look at some amendments. However, I think the underlying bill was strong. It achieves what we need to achieve, and it’s absolutely essential that we pass this. I think we’ll see it back in the short session next year.
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Despite the failure on the Senate side of 2020, it was actually a pretty good session for some key environmental issues that I’ve been following for my district. Diesel pollution has been on the list of topics for years now. We passed HB 2007 to move forward with metro area diesel regulations. We passed a bill to do more for trains that are carrying hazardous materials, like oil trains. We have new money going to more additional planning by the railroads, which is a safety issue. That’s big in my area because I have a lot of material running through my district. We also passed a bill to work on auto dismantlers who aren’t following the law in terms of safe practices – remember that fire out in Cully last year? So I think from an environmental standpoint, we actually made a lot of progress, outside of only getting climate across one chamber.
Zuhl: You mentioned housing earlier. This Legislature has set aside $350 million specifically for the state housing crisis. What’s really new in that pool of money?
Kotek: That’s a good point, because a lot of it is building on what we’ve done the last two years and just growing that in terms of some of the affordable housing construction pots of money that we have.
For example, the LIFT program, which is our primary affordable housing bonding program, I think we were only at $80 million. Now we’re at $150 million. That is incredibly important. We’ve been oversubscribed in projects around the state wanting that help. So we’ve built on existing pots of money. We’ve also put some more money into manufactured home park preservation, and money into trying to acquire currently affordable housing – not things that have been subsidized, but trying to figure out how we can keep the market, affordable housing that’s out there now, and keep it affordable. We’re trying to come up with new ways to improve the amount of subsidized and/or just affordable housing being out there in the market.
Our goal going into session was threefold. We wanted to protect renters, we wanted to do more on the construction and preservation, and we wanted to do more on the overall market supply.
On protecting renters, we passed SB 608 in February for statewide rent stabilization to stop the rent gouging, to provide just-cause evictions. So that was a huge success.
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On the last day of session, we passed HB 2001 and HB 2003, both of which are new approaches to providing more housing via our land use system.
HB 2001 – allowing more middle housing options be constructed in residential areas – is going to be very important over time. HB 2003 is about giving more direction to local jurisdictions to plan for their housing needs. Both of those bills had money for local government to get started on what they need to do. Because we’re not going to catch up with our housing supply problem unless we do the things in those two bills.
Zuhl: As interesting as HB 2001 is, what is the real incentive behind it? How do you incentivize these duplexes, triplexes and more housing on these lots?
Kotek: We want to work with local governments to provide some incentive. But right now, if you’re a developer, your only choice is to build a single-family, detached home because of zoning. Some corner lots in Portland, you can do duplexes. This would, in the next couple of years, say you have other options there. I think you’re going to see more duplexes, more cottage clusters. If you’re a developer and your price of land is a set cost, if you can build more than one home on that plot, you can do that more economically, that provides cheaper options for those new homes. For affordable-housing developers, we’ve been told point blank: If they’re able to buy a plot of land, if they’re able to put more than one home on that plot, that is going to provide more affordability. Their costs are lower because they only have to buy one piece of land, and they can provide two homes or three homes instead of one. That is going to change the supply and types of homes people can get into over time, in Portland and every city over 25,000 in the state of Oregon.
Zuhl: The past two years, Street Roots has done a lot of work around the state, looking at housing in rural communities. What did you hear particularly from rural communities that the Legislature’s actions address? I can think of one bill, the transient lodging tax, which didn’t go anywhere, but that was something coastal communities wanted to help alleviate their housing shortage. What in particular is going to help rural communities that are struggling with a housing crisis?
Kotek: We have seen a sea change in the Legislature about housing. When I started doing this four or five years ago, it was all about “this is Portland’s problem.” Every legislator knows that they have a housing problem. It looks different in each community. Some of it’s poor housing stock, some of it’s no housing at all, not enough for their growing population. The coast is a really particularly challenging place. The transient lodging bill didn’t get enough traction. Maybe that will be back next year. I would say that all of the programs that we do do have statewide impact. The LIFT program has statewide impact in terms of building affordable housing. The new $50 million in state-backed bonds for permanent supportive housing will also benefit places around the state. There is one initiative to Housing and Community Services to work on workforce housing development in rural areas. We dedicated $5 million toward that.
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Zuhl: Shifting gears here a little bit. The public defense funding bill, HB 3145, started out with some real meat to it. It was to address the financial inequity between prosecution funding and public defense, and then all of a sudden it evaporated into a task force. Will that ever be brought back?
Kotek: We did have the report from the Sixth Amendment Center, and there’s also another study that’s not done yet, a caseload study, that we’re supposed to get at the end of the year. I would say it was a timing issue more than anything else.
There’s a recognition we have a problem. The Legislature has put aside $20 million in a special-purpose appropriation. Special-purpose appropriations are money we set aside to identify that we want to move forward on a project and also identify the money that can be used once a plan has been established. I fully expect between now and the short session, we will have, without that bill, a very significant effort, a workgroup probably through our judiciary committee, to figure out what the plan is and how to use that $20 million. The Public Defense Services Commission has been clear that they are going to change how they pay for their services. They need to.
Zuhl: They’re going to do this without any legislation?
Kotek: They feel constitutionally they need to change how they are paying per case. That is going to start to happen. The question is what other judicial reforms do we need in the system and what is it going to cost? And at the end of the day, I think the reason you saw a task force bill is because some questions need to be worked out. Do we need the bill? No. Do we need the $20 million? Yes. So it’s a priority for me. I don’t think we have access to justice when we have an underfunded public defense system. And Rep. (Jennifer) Williamson (D-Portland), our judiciary chair, and I are very committed to that. And she will be leading the charge on our side of the building to work on that in the interim. People should be frustrated by the pace, but we are committed to making these reforms happen.
Zuhl: Speaking of frustrated: What is your role going to be in healing the partisan wounds of 2019?
Kotek: I think you saw some different activity going on in the House versus the Senate. In the House, we managed to work very collaboratively with the House Republican leadership. It wasn’t easy always, but we tried to have open communication and tried to figure out how to work together even though you have a supermajority and a superminority. I’ve been very committed to helping everybody succeed in their districts. You’ll see in the budget allocations that we tried to help all parts of the state, in different types of projects, different types of allocations, focusing on rural economic development where we could.
One of the things I usually do in the interim is I travel to different parts of the state; I visit the districts of my Republican colleagues. Two years ago, we started an exchange program where we paired up Republican and Democrat House members to go visit each other in each other’s districts. I think it really made a difference in this session. People had different relationships. People would stand up on the floor and say, “When I visited so-and-so’s district in Eastern Oregon, this is what I saw; this is why this bill is important.” Those cross-district exchanges – that’s what we’re trying to do on our side of the building to make sure House members understand that what happens in my district in North Portland might look a little different, but my colleague in Klamath Falls has similar issues. How do we work together to solve them?
Everybody needs each other. And we have to make sure that we are working as a state on statewide issues, and that takes relationship building.
Zuhl: Are we going to see you on the ballot in 2020?
Kotek: That’s a good question. I would assume so. I never make a decision until the fall. I love my job, and I love the successes we’ve had for the state. We’ll see. I have to give it some thought.
Legislation in brief
School funding, Medicaid and housing were among House Speaker Tina Kotek’s priorities for the 2019 legislative session. Here is a rundown of notable bills:
Student Success Act (House Bill 3427): A $1 billion annual infusion to Oregon public schools will go toward improving graduation rates, reading levels, childhood learning programs, career training and low-income student assistance. The act is paid for by a 0.57% tax on businesses with more than $1 million in Oregon sales. It applies only to receipts above $1 million, with exceptions for capital or labor costs.
Tobacco tax referral (House Bill 2270): Oregon voters will decide in November to ratify a measure to raise taxes on tobacco products and e-cigarettes. If approved, the additional $2-a-pack tax is expected to bring in between $300 million and $350 million each biennium. Most of the money, 90%, would pay for the state’s Medicaid expansion, and 10% would pay for tobacco prevention and cessation programs.
Affordable-housing bonds (House Bill 5005): $150 million in general obligation bonds are allocated to build more affordable homes for rent and for sale through the LIFT (Local Innovation and Fast Track) program. This includes $25 million in lottery bonds to preserve and maintain access to affordable housing. This nearly doubles the amount previously earmarked for LIFT assistance.
Tenant protections (Senate Bill 608): This bill protects tenants who have been in their current home for a year or more from no-cause evictions, with some exceptions, such as for sale of property. For-cause evictions, as in the case of lease violations, still apply. The bill also limits how much a landlord can raise rent each year to 7%, plus the annual average inflation rate, currently at just over 3%. This applies only to buildings at least 15 years old.
Housing density (House Bill 2001): This bill allows higher-density construction in what were formerly single-family zones. It is expected to clear the way for more duplexes, triplexes, townhomes and cottage clusters in Oregon cities with a population of 25,000 or more.
Sunset extensions: The Legislature passed extensions for multiple programs, including a property tax exemption for affordable housing; the Agricultural Workforce Housing Tax Credit; a tax credit for residents of manufactured home parks facing closure; a capital gains exemption for manufactured home parks that are sold to nonprofits, housing authorities or resident cooperatives; and a sunset extension and small expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org.