NEWS UPDATE FROM STATE REPRESENTATIVE DAVID GOMBERG: A Very Intense Leg Days

EDITOR’S NOTE: When Representative Gomberg is referring to instense “Leg” Days – he’s not talking about a physical work out of his lower extremities, he’s referring to a week spent at the State Legislature, called “Leg (pronounced like “ledge”) Days” … this one really made me chuckle. Even though Representative Gomberg represents another, adjacent district, we share his reports with readers as they are a great summary of what’s happening, and what impacts Lincoln County often impacts Tillamook County.

By Representative David Gomberg, House District 10

Quarterly Legislative Days hearings can usually focus on upcoming issues and anticipated legislation. And honestly, much of that process can seem mundane. But this past week we saw big news and a few bombshells. Here are five takeaways.

My Committee on Commerce and Consumer Protection heard from the Public Utility Commission (PUC) and ratepayer advocates. Over the past three years, electric utilities have proposed increases averaging about 50%. The PUC must allow the opportunity for investor-owned utilities to earn a “reasonable return.” But the steep increases have taken many power customers by surprise.

Watch the full committee hearing here.

There are several explanations. For one, the increase coincided with extremely cold weather. Multi-day winter storms in January certainly raised people’s overall energy use, because it takes a lot more energy to heat a home when the temperature drops – even if the thermostat isn’t turned up higher. This is especially a problem for homes with poor insulation or leaky windows and doors that get chilly during cold spells.

In addition to higher energy use for customers during cold snaps and extreme heat events, changing climate is affecting wholesale energy prices. Because wind and solar are not always reliable energy sources and battery storage is still a nascent concept, energy supply is often tight during extreme weather events. This means energy prices rise exponentially during high-demand periods – a cost that eventually is passed on to customers

Climate change also affects utility equipment. During January’s snow and ice storm, hundreds of large trees toppled, bringing down or uprooting power lines. The utility companies will eventually seek to recover those costs from ratepayers.

Finally, Oregon law requires PGE and Pacific Power to reduce their carbon emissions by 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2040. This means getting rid of coal and natural gas and relying 100% on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. In addition, new demand – from electric cars, home heating and data centers – will bring additional loads and further increase the need for clean energy.

Utilities project that meeting the state mandates and new loads will require massive new investments. So they’re spending more money on new transmission lines, wind turbines, solar farms and battery storage projects – and asking to recover those costs in rates.

As the climate gets hotter and drier, utility wires also are causing more wildfires. Multiple utilities across the West in Oregon, California, Hawaii and Colorado now face billions of dollars in damages over their failures to prepare, leading to catastrophic wildfires. Many utilities are now spending millions on trimming trees and vegetation near power lines, burying power lines, investing in better weather monitoring and other measures to harden their equipment and prevent wildfires.

Wildfire mitigation is the biggest driver of Pacific Power’s proposed rate increase. But there is concern whether another factor is that wildfire litigation and settlements of 2020 wildfire losses. I drilled down on this question during the Monday hearing.

“There’s a fundamental question whether it’s legal to charge customers for those damages. If a court puts punitive damages on a company and that company is just allowed by regulators to pass those punitive damages on to customers, who’s being punished?” I asked whether the PUC could manage this question or needed direction from the legislature in 2025.

Tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act kicked in earlier this year, allowing taxpayers to shave a few thousand dollars off the cost of a heat pump, home insulation or other energy efficiency projects. Lower income customers can apply for income-qualified utility bill discount programs. PGE has just expanded its bill discount program to provide up to a 60% monthly energy discount to customers who qualify. Pacific Power has a similar program as does NW Natural.

The PUC only regulates privately held, for-profit utility companies, not PUDs, Municipals, or Cooperatives.

While it was not part of a legislative hearing, there was more dramatic news on the coastal energy front this week. Amid mounting opposition to wind development off the coast of Oregon, the federal government announced Friday it is delaying a planned auction for the development of two wind energy sites.

Oregon concern about floating offshore wind has grown exponentially over the past few months. The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management with the intent to delay the upcoming auction, and at least two counties, Coos and Curry, will be voting on whether to publicly oppose offshore wind.

The Coastal Caucus has been actively urging BOEM to take more time and engage with coastal communities, Tribes, and industries as we balance our need for more renewable energy and potential consequences to coastal industries and coastal livability against concerns about environmental impacts and threats to culturally and economically significant sites that are home to fish and other marine species.

The state’s planned Offshore Wind Roadmap, part of House Bill 4080 which passed this year, is meant to lay the foundation for offshore wind energy development that complies with labor standards and with community input. I was a chief sponsor of that bill. The Bureau had planned to auction the sites on October 15 but said in its announcement that officials decided to postpone the auction after receiving a notice of interest from only one of five qualified companies.

Environmental groups, fishing industry representatives, legislators, and local tribes praised Friday’s decision to cancel the planned auction. They’ve repeatedly raised concerns about how development could affect fisheries and the marine environment.

The two sites would cover 61,200 acres off the coast near Coos Bay and nearly 134,000 acres off the coast of Brookings. The Coos Bay site is 30 miles from the coast and the Brookings area is 20 miles away and they could potentially generate more than 3.1 gigawatts of renewable energy, enough to power 1 million households.

In its statement, the federal agency said it would continue work with state, local and tribal officials on the issue and coordinate potential leases and engagement with communities. BOEM said the state’s roadmap for offshore wind energy is one way to do that. But the agency didn’t give a timeline for what might happen next or when it might come out with one.

Starting next month, the Oregon agency charged with protecting workers’ rights will automatically dismiss wage claims from residents whose annual earnings exceed a certain amount.

Oregon’s workforce has expanded over the decades as the state population has grown. At the same time, the state Legislature has continued to implement protections for workers, including their ability to challenge wage concerns. Online complaint forms have resulted in more complaints being filed. Put together, those things are straining state agencies where staffing and funding levels have not kept pace with the increase in responsibilities.

Monday, Bureau of Labor and Industries Commissioner Christina Stephenson told the state Senate’s business and labor committee that claims have gone up dramatically —more than 200% since 2020. BOLI is requesting a more than 35% bump in funding when state lawmakers craft the 2025-27 budget. BOLI is requesting an additional $17 million to improve on areas like case management replacement, agency modernization and sustainability within its wage and hour division. Stephenson said additional funding could help boost staffing and therefore give investigators more time to review worker claims.

Part of the problem is that BOLI does not have enough investigators. In May of this year, the Bureau had a backlog of about 3,250 wage claims — some of which involved cases from 2022 and 2023. Officials recorded a backlog of just over 2000 claims as of September 23. The Bureau currently employs 10 labor standards investigators. Leaders hope to hire seven more by Fiscal Year 2026. But that may be a problem since those investigators are paid less than workers in comparable positions in other state agencies. Said another way, even with funding for more investigators, BOLI has trouble recruiting and retaining.

In the meanwhile, wage theft victims in Oregon who make $52,710 or more per year will no longer have their cases investigated by the state as of October 1. The Bureau of Labor and Industries is implementing an income threshold that it estimates will lead to the automatic dismissal of 17% of cases because the claimant makes too much money. In other words, if you make more than $25 an hour, the state will not protect you. And that’s a problem…

I’m meeting with the Commissioner next week to review these budget questions.

The Legislative Emergency Board where I serve voted Wednesday to send $47.5 million to the Forestry Department to help cover the costs of the 2024 wildfire season. Spending on wildfires so far this year has topped nearly $250 million, about 2.5 times the amount budgeted for wildfire response.

There have been more than 2,000 fires this year that have scorched nearly 2 million acres – a record in the state and more than three times the 10-year average for acres burned. The state will likely wrap up its now five-month-long fire season in mid-October, according to experts.

Wildfires were the priority and several other major expenditures were deferred until December. That included the first installment of a $40 million proposal to keep the container facility open at the Port of Portland’s Terminal 6. You can watch the discussion here.

Learn about the proposal here.

The legislative week concluded with a hearing on news that clerical errors at DMV had resulted in 1,259 non-citizens being potentially registered to vote.

None of the Oregon residents who were automatically registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the deciding ballot, the state’s elections director told lawmakers on Wednesday. That was the biggest news out of an hourlong hearing of the House Rules Committee, in which staff from the Secretary of State’s Office, the director of the Oregon Department of Transportation and the administrator of the department’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division explained how people were automatically registered despite not providing documents that proved citizenship.

According to results of an audit released Monday, as many as nine people might have voted since early 2021 even though they were not citizens. Officials have stressed that none of those registered improperly actively sought to deceive the government. State elections leaders have blamed the problem on a clerical error within the DMV.

Watch the entire hearing here.

According to state officials, the errant registrations were the result of both staff inattention and a poorly laid out computer program. For nearly a decade, Oregon has automatically registered people to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license, a policy known as Oregon Motor Voter. But the DMV is only supposed to forward a person’s information to elections officials if they provide proof they are a U.S. citizen.

The DMV first disclosed September 13 it had discovered in an audit that some clerks had entered people into the system as providing a U.S. passport or birth certificate, when in fact they had provided documents from other countries.

DMV has now reviewed 1.4 million total customer records. The review consisted of a system or manual review by DMV staff for every file to determine if incorrect citizenship information was transmitted to the Secretary of State. Everyone improperly registerred has been notified that their registration was incorrect, that they cannot vote, they have been removed from voter files and will not receive a ballot next month. When the human errors were found, the DMV and SOS acted quickly to address the issue to ensure it will have no effect on the 2024 election. Additional steps have been implemented so that these errors do not continue.

Numerically this is all insignificant. But the mistake is significant. We all value secure and transparent elections. And I personally support making registration easy and encouraging more qualified voters to participate. Automatic voter registration has allowed us to engage over one million new eligible voters while updating address and name information for millions of existing registrants. Our priority is the safety and security of our elections, which is why we take errors like this so seriously.

Learn more here.

Non-citizens who were mistakenly registered by the DMV to vote will receive help from the state of Oregon to ensure the error does not affect their path to citizenship, officials said Wednesday. “Of those nine individuals who voted, they voted as a result of a government mistake,” said Committee Chair Ben Bowman. “They didn’t ask to be registered to vote, but they were by their government. Their government sent them ballots, we all talked about the importance of voting, and then they voted.”

My week was not all about legislative hearings.

Friday I sat down with the Oregon Environmental Council, joined the annual Ports Association meeting, and attended a Benton County Regional Housing Needs discussion. Thursday I was part of a conversation and reception with a visiting delegation of the Dutch fish processing industry. And Saturday, Susie and I took time to enjoy light jazz at the Sea Hag with Oregon icon Tom Grant.

In the coming week, I’ll meet with the Oregon Manufactured Housing Association, a candidate fair in Pacific City, and watch the Vice Presidential debate Tuesday evening.

The Ocean Science Trust meets Wednesday and I plan to be at the Alsea School District Vocational Shop Grand Opening. Thursday is the Coastal Caucus monthly meeting and a celebration for the David Ogden Stires Theater at the Newport PAC. Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, Susie and I will enjoy the annual Jazz Party in Newport. Then I rush back to Lincoln City for Culture Of Course where I’m pleased to be the auctioneer supporting the Cultural Center. That takes us to Monday when I run to Portland for the Historical Society’s History Makers Awards and Dinner.

All these dinners and receptions are making it hard to lose any weight!