A Modest Proposal For The Oregon Legislature

By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
This column was originally published in the Central Oregonian, August 2005

One Local Polititician's Ideas About How to Build A Better Legislature

The 74th General Assembly finally gaveled to conclusion last week at 6:20 a.m. on Friday morning. For the most part, this Legislature left shallow footprints in the sands of time, and it will be remembered more for what it didn’t do than what it accomplished.

One bill that did pass, however, does have the potential to bring about real change on the Oregon political landscape. Senate Bill 1084 created a 30-member commission to review all aspects of the Oregon’s legislative branch of government. The commission is supposed to study all aspects of how the legislature does (and does not) function, including timing, frequency and length of sessions, legislative procedures and the adequacy of legislative facilities and staffing.

There is a chance this bill could propose some fundamental and much needed reforms for the way we govern ourselves in Oregon.

Let me be candid and state that my expectations aren’t high. In many ways, I think the committee’s charge is predictive of what the commission will recommend. It will likely recommend annual sessions to replace the current sessions held only in odd-numbered years. It will probably recommend beefing up the legislative pay package. I think it will recommend professionalizing legislative staffing, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it recommend some major capital investment in the Capitol building itself to create space and upgrade technology.

Unfortunately, all those things qualify as “business as usual” as far as I’m concerned. What’s really needed—and where I doubt the commission or the legislature will go—if fundamental and far-reaching reform of the institution itself.

If I were a commissioner making recommendations on how to change the Legislature to make it more effective (And I won’t be since the commission has already been selected, with only one of 1 of the 30 commission members coming from east of the Cascades), I would make a few more radical suggestions. Tongue-in-cheek, you can call these ideas, A Modest Proposal.

The first thing I think the commission ought to remind the Legislature is that Constitutionally it only has one job: to balance the state’s budget. With that in mind, the Legislature ought to impose on itself a simple rule: Until a budget is passed, no other legislation will be allowed to move to floor for a vote.

Had this rule been in effect in 2005, the Legislature wouldn’t have been able to spend months taking floor votes on “important” issues such as which variety of pear should be designated the official state fruit? It couldn’t have spent floor time discussing whether Oregon should have a state fossil. It couldn’t have spent time arguing about the need for a Smokey the Bear commemorative Oregon license plate while the education budget languished. Only after passing a budget balancing resources between schools, human services and public safety would the legislature have been allowed to take votes on these issues, assuming they still wanted to spend time, on such issues once their main chore was accomplished.

Critics of this idea will immediately respond that they don’t have data on which to build a budget until well after session starts, and they shouldn’t start building budgets too early. So here’s another crazy idea the commission could recommend: Start the session later! A session that started in late spring and ran until fall and put major effort into getting the budget bills out in the first 90 days would not only spend its time on what’s important, it would also put legislators and Oregonians interested in the process on the road when the sun is shining and the pavement is dry. That alone might improve the mood in Salem, and it would certainly improve the ability of people in the eastern part of the state to participate in a meaningful way in state government.

Which brings me to my third idea, and the most radical suggestion I have for the commission. If it really wants to change the tone it Salem, it should re-examine one of the fundamental premises of Oregon government: how we allocate our legislators among ourselves.

There are, at present, 30 Oregon senators. They are elected based on population. As a result they are predominantly from the west side, with a heavy concentration in the Metro area. The House is elected the same way with the same resulting skew in representation. The districts on the westside are geographically compact. The individuals who represent them tend to know their neighborhoods and don’t spend half their campaign driving about. By contrast, the districts on the eastside are enormous. Our own Senate district covers all of Crook and Lake, parts of Kamath, Deschutes and parts of Jackson counties, and we’re not the biggest!

It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. Congress has a population-based House and a geographically based Senate with two senators from each state. Why not apply the same principle to Oregon and create a Senate that allocates one senator from each county for a total of 36? The additional six senators are a small price to pay for giving all Oregonians an equal voice in the legislative process, no matter where they live. In addition, because voters at the County level will have a better chance of knowing the individual they are voting for, the quality of representation will likely go up as well.

I have a few other ideas about things the Legislature ought to do differently. They don’t include an annual session. They don’t include a highly compensated legislature where professional politicians replace citizens with jobs and mortgages. And they don’t include a new office building in Salem. As a result, they probably haven’t got a prayer of ending up in the final report of the Senate Bill1084 Commission.

That’s too bad. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way time after time and expecting a different result. The SB1084 commission can choose whether it wants to continue the insanity or propose measures to make a real difference in our state’s future.