According to Alan Journet, "SOCAN's Federal and State Project Team survived a rather bland 2024 Oregon Legislative Session." during which they monitored and testified on (for or against) their Legislative Top Dozen Plus, some 20 or so bills. SOCAN's track record for bills passing or failing as wished was estimated to be about 75%.
Notable among the positives were:
Campaign Finance Reform bill (HB4024) referring constitutional adjustments to the November ballot that contained much that was in the Initiative Petition 9 drive that we supported (HB4024 was initially proposed as a sham, but due to massive critical testimony was amended),
COAL Act (HB4083) urging Oregon Treasury divestment from entities promoting coal,
Affordable Housing (SB1537), promoted by the state's Governor, which was amended (also in response to substantial critical testimony) to impose stricter restrictions on the Urban Growth Boundary expansion option.
Offshore wind energy development (HB4080) to promote community engagement to resolve community concerns about developing the offshore wind turbine effort off Oregon’s South Coast, a bill
Marine Reserves (HB4132) to promote the marine reserve program,
Resilient, affordable, and healthy homes (SB1530) was funded, but not quite at the level we all hoped.
"The Legislative Session ended a few days early with several bills stalled in Ways and Means, largely because the legislature ran out of money."
"Regrettably, there was no successful legislation addressing forest management/wildfire issues, and a bill (SB1559) updating the state’s greenhouse gas emissions goal was not passed. Neither was a bill to refer to voters an adjustment to the legislative Quorum from the current ridiculous 2/3rds down to 50% or something reasonable. Reports from the chambers suggest these last two efforts (and some others) failed because legislative Democratic leadership was concerned that insisting on their consideration would have stimulated another Republican walk-out, thus defeating a host of valuable measures that ultimately passed. Again, the minority party was successful at dictating, to an unreasonable extent, what the majority party’s legislative agenda should be."
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