Michelle Cole
The Oregonian Staff
SALEM -- The night before the 2008 Legislature ended, a Democratic leader told Rep. Sara Gelser that the bill she'd worked on for months was officially dead.
The bill would have required the state to make public the names of caregivers who abuse people with disabilities.
Gelser was furious as she left the Capitol: "I find it a great irony that tomorrow we will make attending a dogfight a felony . . . when we're talking about thousands of vulnerable people still in danger."
She had taken care of cost and other concerns, and gotten her bill through committee on a unanimous vote, Gelser said before heading home to Corvallis on Thursday night. But a session designed to be short, frugal and noncontroversial worked against the Democratic legislator.
That was a problem for a lot of lawmakers.
Trying to avoid controversy in an election year, the Legislature set a very limited agenda for its experiment with annual sessions. And that's what it achieved. Regular sessions are long, allowing for negotiation and compromise on big, complicated issues. Emergency sessions tackle one pressing subject and call it a day.
The February session was neither. Lawmakers didn't have offices, they had little money to spend with revenues declining, and they had no time to plunge into thorny matters. So they stuck to what they could do easily, booting difficult questions into 2009.
The House speaker and Senate president gaveled the session closed just before 10 p.m. Friday. Lawmakers rushed for the doors, leaving the Capitol nearly empty a half-hour later as they headed home and back to their election campaigns.
Lawmakers, lobbyists and others who watched the session say they're not certain the three-week meeting accomplished enough to persuade the public to invite lawmakers back every year instead of every two.
"It's probably too soon to absolutely say this is a failure," said Gary Conkling, who has worked inside the Capitol as a reporter, then lobbyist, on and off since 1973. "But I don't think it's too soon to say the format doesn't work."
Normally, the Oregon Legislature meets in general session every odd-numbered year. Lawmakers arrive in January and settle in for six months -- or longer. Sometimes lawmakers also meet for emergency sessions for specific purposes; the most recent one, in 2006, lasted only six hours.
The February session was intentionally different. It began Feb. 4, with a deadline of Feb. 29 to finish.
The hurried schedule -- requiring bills to move quickly or die -- left little time to find compromise, Conkling said. "This format did not allow the session to be as productive as it might have been."
When the Legislature adjourned one week ahead of its self-imposed deadline, lawmakers had passed 73 bills in 19 days; 36 bills didn't make it.
Though lawmakers approved a resolution declaring June 17, 2008, as "Salem-Keizer Volcanoes Baseball Day," they said there was not enough time to dig into limits on legal claims against government agencies.
Still, Democrats, who control a majority in the House and Senate, issued news releases minutes after the session ended listing their accomplishments.
They noted that lawmakers endorsed two bills to help homeowners caught in the nation's mortgage crisis; they voted to ask Oregonians to toughen criminal sentences; and they made it much harder for illegal immigrants to get an Oregon driver's license.
Senate President Peter Courtney, a Salem Democrat who persuaded his colleagues to give the short supplemental session a try, said it was important that legislators were in the Capitol and able to respond quickly to a scathing federal report about the state mental hospital and to warnings that Oregon's tax revenues are falling far short of expectations.
Lawmakers set aside more than $6.7 million for hospital improvements and pared other spending requests.
"This session was productive and instructive," Courtney said.
He would do it differently next time, however.
"The fact is, it should go longer," Courtney said. The general session, he added, should be shorter.
News releases from Republicans also identified "important accomplishments" from the session, including more Oregon State Police troopers and money to study both land-use policies and water storage.
GOP leader unconvinced
But Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, said he is not convinced that the Legislature made its case for annual sessions.
On Thursday night, as Gelser learned the fate of her bill, other lawmakers spent an hour shining the Capitol's tarnished stair rails.
"Polishing the brass was the only thing we did of lasting benefit to the state," Ferrioli said.
Oregon is one of only six states with a Legislature that meets every two years instead of annually. There's debate within the legal community about whether Oregon would have to change its constitution to enable annual legislative sessions to happen.
But even if a constitutional change isn't technically necessary, it is politically necessary, said Paul Diller, who teaches state and local government classes at Willamette University's College of Law in Salem.
"For better or worse," he said, "I think voters would like to feel they're somewhat involved in making the decision.
"The Legislature is sort of between a rock and a hard place. Since they only have a month, they really can't do anything too ambitious. But the very fact that they don't accomplish anything of significance may be held against them by the public."
Looking to next year
By Saturday morning, Gelser said she wasn't angry about the death of her bill anymore, just disappointed. But she also questioned whether the abbreviated session was the right model for how annual sessions should run.
"To make an annual session work," she said, "it will take more than three weeks if we're going to tackle substantive issues."
One good thing for Gelser about the February session: In only 10 months, the Legislature meets again. She's already thinking about how to bring her bill back next year.
Washington's legislature meets for 105 days in odd-numbered years, when lawmakers draft the budget, and for 60 days in even years. Courtney said that's one model worth considering.
He'll propose that the 2009 Legislature put a constitutional amendment before the voters calling for annual sessions.
In his closing speech Friday night, he asked senators to go home and think about their three-week experiment.
"We surprised some, disappointed others," he said. "Each of us in our own way and in our own time will decide how to talk to the world about what we did here today."
Story posted February 24, 2008