As lawmakers have descended on Salem for their “short annual legislative session,” the time is right to emphasize again questions legislators should ask as they contemplate adding to Oregon laws.
It used to be that Oregon’s Constitution limited sessions to every-other-year – the odd year. That changed several years ago when, led by Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, legislators proposed and voters approved a move to annual sessions.

Courtney and others sold the idea as a way for legislators to move farther toward being equal with the Executive Branch rather than just showing up in Salem every other year, leaving the State of Oregon’s business mostly to state agencies.
Courtney wanted the short session – it lasts only for a month – to deal with housekeeping measures, emergencies and other smaller-gauge issues that could not wait until the regular odd-year sessions. It would not be a session devoted to major policy proposals. No one seems sure this year that small issues will dominate the session. Democrats headed to the Capitol with what has been described as an aggressive agenda — new taxes, a minimum wage increase and affordable housing proposals.

Republican leaders countered that those issues were too big for a short session and responded, on the first day in Salem, by demanding that individual bills be read in their entirely, word-for-word. Usually, bills are read aloud by title only. The Republican move appeared to catch Democrats off guard, but clerks in both the House and the Senate were reporting to be looking for computer programs that would bills aloud, but at warp speed.

Before the session, Courtney’s counterpart in the Senate, Senator Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, issued a news release questioning whether Courtney and the Ds had designed the short session properly.

“As I recall,” Ferrioli wrote, “Oregonians were sold on the idea of annual meetings with the promise that the short session would focus on balancing the budget, making small legislative fixes, often referred to as housekeeping measures, and responding to emergencies that need immediate attention from the Legislature. I’m sorry to report that the short session has become little more than a setting for the majority party to pursue an over-reaching agenda of tax increases, regulation, and ideological issues dear to the progressives who rule Portland and to a great extent, the rest of Oregon.”

Ferrioli expressed concern that a minimum wage increase, a “cap and trade” energy mandate that he said would raise energy costs for businesses and families, and a mandate for affordable housing that the said would force construction contractors to build a certain amount of below-cost housing units for people of limited means, to be paid for by higher costs passed on to more traditional home buyers were appropriate for consideration in a short session.
Courtney and Ferrioli will never agree on policy, nor should they as they play their leading roles for Democrats and Republicans.

But, as they meet at the Capitol, legislators on both sides of the aisle should be prepared to ask at least four questions in relation to each legislative proposal, however big or small it is.
1. What is the problem for which a proposed policy or action is deemed to be the solution?

2. Is there an appropriate role for government to play?

3. If there is, what does the state expect to get for the money it is spending — in other words, what is the expected return on investment?

4. How will state government action affect the private sector, especially individual and corporate taxpayers on whom the state depends for money to fund its operations?

If legislators would ask and answer these questions with a constructively critical eye, observers have said Oregonians would have both a better legislature and better results.