NEWS UPDATE FROM STATE REPRESENTATIVE DAVID GOMBERG: Day One

By Representative David Gomberg, House District 10

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

If you are reading this after Monday, January 13, the 83^rd Assembly of the Oregon Legislature is now underway.

Opening day includes many formalities. The House will convene at 8:30 a.m. and the Senate at 9:30. The first order of business for each chamber will be the swearing-in of new and returning members. I often observe that on the first day, we get sworn in. After that we get sworn at…

The Senate will elect a President and the House a Speaker. We also elect a President Pro Tempore and a Speaker Pro Tempore to fill in when the presiding officer is not available to run the chamber meeting. Democrats will present nominations and the Republicans may do the same. The outcome of these elections is known in advance, as the majority Democrats in each chamber have already decided who they will support. I have been selected to serve as House Speaker Pro Tempore.

Session rules will then be voted on. And as the ranking member of the House rules workgroup, I will present that report.

Committees will be established and the bills filed in advance will be formally introduced. That will take time since more than 2,000 measures have already been submitted.

The Oregon Legislature begins its 2025 work on Monday, with just more than five months to pass a budget and tackle pressing issues including homelessness and housing, education, health and mental health care, highway funding and wildfire response. The 90-member Legislature must end its work by June 29.

While the reading clerks are going quickly through the list of bills, it’s a time for legislators to socialize a bit. Many of the new members will have met one another already during various orientations, but in many cases, it’ll be the first opportunity for returning members to meet new people from the opposite parties. Generally, only one guest is allowed on the floor with each legislator.

At 1 p.m. the newly sworn in senators and representatives, along with special guests, will meet jointly in the House chamber for further ceremony—speeches by the presiding officers and the Governor’s State of the State address.

Opening day is always one of pride and promise. It is a heart-warming, moving day for legislators, especially the new ones, who worked so hard to get to this point and are still a bit unsure about what lies ahead. But even for the veterans, it’s a very special day. And then the work begins.

Two thousand bills will be introduced on the first day and we can expect as many as 4,000 before we are done. That’s a lot! Most of these proposals come to us from advocate groups and constituents.

Mercifully, the very great majority of proposals will not become law. The pathway from introduction to adoption is a long and tedious one. About 500 bills, including budgets for more than 100 state agencies, are expected to make it to the finish line. So most will die in committee along the way. The main thing to watch for are deadlines.

The deadline for introducing any bills is February 25^th. Bills introduced in the House must have a hearing, be approved in committee, and scheduled for a floor vote by April 9^th or they are dead. If they advance to the Senate, they need committee approval and a full vote by May 23^rd. After that, most committees begin to close down and the focus on the session turns to finalizing budgets. On May 14, we receive the final revenue forecast that tells us how much money we have. The session concludes on June 29^th at the latest.

You can watch the House and Senate sessions here.
You can review all of the bills introduced here.
If there’s a bill that you’re particularly interested in following, or a committee whose work you want to follow, you can sign up to be on their email list. You’ll be kept up to date on any action involving the particular bill or the meetings and potential votes of the particular committee. The Legislative Policy and Research Office (LPRO) has put together a simple primer on how to sign up. You’ll find it here.
Here is the complete list of Senate committee appointments. And here are the House appointments.
Here’s the committee schedule for the session, just updated to show room assignments.
And here are links to a wealth of information on how to engage with the Legislature in a variety of ways, again thanks to LPRO.

Big news this week is the start of the session. But there is other news of consequence weighing on me as well.

The Oregon fire season has thankfully concluded. But we are all aware of the terrible fires in and around Los Angeles. I hope that by the time you receive this, they will have turned the corner and be on track to contain them.

Legislators received the following email Thursday evening from our State Fire Marshal, Mariana Ruiz-Temple. I have edited it slightly for brevity.

As you may have heard, the Oregon State Fire Marshal has mobilized a significant number of resources at the request of California to help with the historic fires burning near Los Angeles.

As of Thursday night, the Oregon State Fire Marshal sent 15 strike teams with 300 firefighters and 75 engines through the Oregon Fire Mutual Aid System. This system is made up of 306 fire agencies and administered and managed through the Department of the State Fire Marshal in partnership with our Oregon fire chiefs.

All 75 engines and 300 firefighters mobilized Wednesday and headed to California. These resources are working for CAL Fire and will follow their processes and procedures. One of the processes that CAL Fire implements is engine safety inspections before resources are assigned to an incident. These inspections ensure all engines on an emergency scene are equipped, mechanically sound, and able to respond.

All Oregon resources are assigned to the Palisades Fire.

We remain in contact with our partners in California to assess their needs as they respond to this crisis. We are extremely proud of these teams and our support staff for the monumental effort it took to get them on the road so quickly.

We are also proud of Oregon’s reputation, sending the most resources to help during this time.

I extended to our crews the support and comments we have received from you thus far. If you have any questions, please reach out.

Thank you and take good care.

Mariana Ruiz-Temple, Oregon State Fire Marshal

Crews from five Lincoln and Tillamook county fire departments gathered in Gleneden Beach on Wednesday before heading out to Southern California. Read more here.

Over the past five years in Oregon, we’ve seen historic wildfire seasons and California has been up here every year assisting us with protecting homes and containing those fires. Now California needs our help. I’m proud to say that Oregonians have once again stepped up in a big way, quickly sending the greatest number from any state to help our neighbors to the South.

Local crews deployed to California include Central Oregon Coast Fire & Rescue, North Lincoln Fire and Rescue, Philomath Fire and Rescue, Monroe, Depoe Bay, and Newport.

The firefighters will be deployed for up to 14 days and are protecting homes and other buildings. The teams will be patrolling for hotspots and working alongside CAL Fire and other state and federal agencies.

KATU Channel 2, responding to false social media statements this week, reported that Oregon’s firetrucks are not being held up by emissions testing in California.

One of my primary concerns as a state representative is your cost of living. And that certainly includes the cost of essentials like electric power.

In December, the three-member Oregon Public Utilities Commission (PUC) voted to approve Pacific Power’s latest request to raise residential electricity rates by nearly 10% in 2025. The rates are lower than the company requested. Pacific Power in September petitioned to raise rates by nearly 11% in 2025.

PacifiCorp is the state’s second-largest investor-owned electric utility and serves about 574,000 customers – including much of HD 10.

The PUC has approved rate hikes nearly every year for the past four years, and today Pacific Power customers pay 50% more for electricity than they did in 2021. That increase is more than twice the rate of inflation.

The company has sought rate hikes for several reasons, including rising inflation, building infrastructure for clean energy generation and storage, and higher insurance costs due to wildfires and wildfire recovery costs. The commission allowed Pacific Power to raise rates most recently, in part, to cover $25 million worth of restoration work following the 2020 Labor Day fires.

The utility set records in 2024 for disconnecting customers from power for nonpayment. From January to October, Pacific Power disconnected more than 20,000 households, up from 8,000 during the same period in 2023, according to the Citizens’ Utility Board. In response, the Public Utilities Commission will prohibit the companies from disconnecting low-income customers who are enrolled in bill discount programs between January and April so people are not left without power during the coldest months of the year.

The company has focused on wildfire costs as a reason it needed to raise rates in recent years.

The company was found liable for several of the 2020 Labor Day megafires that burned thousands of structures and took nine lives. They have spent nearly $2.7 billion on lawsuits since, according to a recent report submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The federal government has now been added to the list of plaintiffs, seeking reimbursement for costs and damages federal agencies incurred fighting Oregon fires. Other plaintiffs include businesses like the wine industry who assert losses from smoke damage, and hundreds of family fire survivors.

Total damages could surge to as much as $46 billion.

Pacific Power is owned by PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate. PacifiCorp is worth $10.7 billion, according to its attorneys, while the Oregon Department of Revenue and Oregon Tax Court calculate its worth more than $19 billion.

The U.S. Attorney General’s Office is seeking reimbursement for costs related to the Archie Creek Fire and the nearby Susan Creek Fire, totaling up to $625 million. PacifiCorp sent about the same amount annually to Berkshire shareholders in earnings prior to the 2020 Labor Day fires, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.

So as we all struggle to pay increasing power bills, a fundamental question is evolving. If courts assess punitive and compensatory damages, who should pay them? Shareholders or ratepayers?? And what is the future of this investor-owned electric utility?

PacifiCorp and its parent company have been calling for regulatory and legislative reforms to limit mounting multibillion-dollar wildfire liabilities. At the same time, some Oregon lawmakers want to stop utility companies from raising rates on customers while those companies are still resolving years-long lawsuits over wildfire culpability and costs.

Stay tuned. There is much at stake.

I’ll spend much of the next six months commuting to Salem. That means fewer local appearances. But I did take time this past week for a few interesting stops.

In 2023, I worked hard to pass legislation to get more Oregon seafood into local restaurants. Thursday I stopped by the Central Coast Food Web (CCFW) to see one example of how that effort is evolving.

With a state-of-the-art processing facility, local online market, and business support for producers, the CCFW is strengthening our local, coastal and regional food systems by providing services and support to small, independent food producers and making it easier for all people to eat local food.

Senator Anderson and I spent three hours answering questions for the Oregon Coast Learning Institute, an organization of retired and semi-retired people who desire to continue their education in an atmosphere of shared learning. I also visited Able House, a new safe and welcoming space for individuals experiencing mental health crises or emotional distress.

And finally, I spent time at a standing-room-only forum of community leaders, police and sheriff deputies, business leaders, and local families concerned about potential deportations, property rights, and the fate of their families in a changing immigration landscape.

This is a time of challenge and of opportunity. If I can promise you one thing about this new legislative session, it is that we will not solve all of the problems Oregonians have been struggling with overnight. But working together and focusing on the common values and goals we share, we can make significant progress on the challenges we’ve been faced with. I continue to believe we can make things better.