NEWS UPDATE FROM STATE REPRESENTATIVE DAVID GOMBERG: Eight Big Stories from 2024

>By Representative David Gomberg, House District 10

1/6/2025
As we begin a new year, it is helpful to look back at the big political and economic issues of the past year.

It is interesting to me that many of the major challenges we face today are the same as those we faced this time last year – the availability and affordability of housing; the availability and affordability of health care; the quality of local jobs, public safety, the cost of living and the quality of life. A lot of that you can’t do much about and neither can I. We all live under the umbrella of national politics and global economies. But there are other things we can do something about.

The stories I’ve touched on here are those kinds of stories.

Elections Re-Elect: Republicans won the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and the presidency, but the red wave failed to reach Oregon’s shores or Oregon in general.

Across our “purple” district, everyone seeking re-election was re-elected. That included Congresswoman Val Hoyle, Senator Dick Anderson, and myself. I was actually nominated by the Democratic, Republican, and Independent parties. And in one of the closest and most dramatic races in the region, Lincoln County Commissioner Claire Hall prevailed by a razor-thin 115 vote margin.

Legislators take the oath of office in 2023.

New mayors replaced retiring mayors in Waldport and Philomath. That means our cities will now be led by Susan Wahlke (Lincoln City), Kathy Short (Depoe Bay), Jan Kaplan (Newport), Heide Lambert (Waldport), Craig Berdie (Yachats), Rod Cross (Toledo), Will Worman (Siletz), Christopher McMorran (Philomath) and Dan Sheets (Monroe). Other new faces include Gabe Shepherd who will join the Benton County Commission, Adam Shanks elected Lincoln County Sherriff, and Jenna Wallace the new Lincoln District Attorney.

Statewide, Democrats now hold both US Senate seats, five of six Congressional positions, all statewide offices (Governor, Secretary of State, Treasurer, Attorney General and Labor Commissioner) and picked up seats to secure a 60% “super-majority” in the State House and Senate.

Fewer Lincoln County residents and Oregonians overall voted in this presidential election compared to the last one.

In all, 2,308,256 Oregonians returned their ballots this year, which was 105,634 fewer voters than 2020, or a 5 percent decline, according to data recently released by the Oregon Secretary of State. Turnout in Lincoln County was 30,161 compared with 30,968 who voted four years ago in the 2020 presidential general election. (Our district includes all of Lincoln County but only portions of Lane and Benton which makes comparisons difficult.)

The state’s 75 percent overall turnout rate remains higher than the national average of about 64 percent, but the decline this year is similar to other states, including those on the West Coast.

Infrastructure Investments Build Important Stuff: Too often, small towns can’t afford big projects. I point to Siletz with 1100 people and a $12 million sewer problem.

Bringing home funding for needed local projects reduces costs for local residents, empowers the local economy, and improves livability.

In Salem, I’m earning a reputation as the rural infrastructure guy securing dollars for important projects. That includes water, sewer, ports, parks and community plazas.

Certainly the largest and most pressing district project is replacement of the vulnerable Big Creek Dams in Newport. The city first committed $6 million. I secured another $14 million from the state. And then I traveled with a Newport delegation to Washington DC where we leveraged local and state investments into another $60 million of authorized federal funding. That success landed me on the cover of Municipal Water Leader Magazine.

Water and sewer are central to our goals of building more housing. I often argue that without clean water coming out of the tap and dirty water going down the drain, housing isn’t very livable. So in 2024, my legislative team went to work to secure $100 million for 50 water projects around rural Oregon. District 10 of course got their share, including investments in Siletz, Toledo, Lincoln City, Newport, Florence, Waldport and Monroe.

We also secured funding for trades education at Oregon Coast Community College, housing at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, addiction treatment and recovery at Samaritan, rodeo stands in Philomath, and new parks in Lincoln City.

The list is long and I’m proud of it! Dozens of local infrastructure improvements total nearly $100 million in the past two years.

Lincoln County: homelessness and shelters – $1 million
Benton County: homeless housing – $2.5 million
Oregon Coast Community College: bonding authority for trades education – $8.1 million
Lincoln City – wastewater infrastructure for housing – $3 million
Newport: Samaritan Treatment & Recovery Services – $1.3 million
Hatfield: Marine Science Center housing – $6.5 million
Philomath: Skirvin Park rodeo stands renovations – $1.9 million
Newport: wastewater infrastructure – $3.8 million
Florence: water/sewer/stormwater infrastructure for housing – $1.3 million
Toledo: water/sewer/stormwater infrastructure for housing – $640,000
Monroe: water infrastructure – $1.5 million
Siletz: wastewater treatment plant upgrades – $3 million
Toledo: Sanitary Sewer Extension, Port of Toledo – $2.425 million
Toledo: Greater Toledo Pool Recreation District – $3 million
Waldport: Water Tank Replacement: $2.2 million
Waldport: Wastewater Plant Repairs: $1.4 million
Depoe Bay: Restoration of Pilings and Docks: $4.4 million
Eddyville: East Lincoln County Firehall: $4 million
Siletz: Tribal Arts & Heritage Center: $750 thousand
Newport: Big Creek Dams Remediation: $14 million
Newport: Oregon Coast Aquarium: $5.1 million
Newport: South Beach Seawall Repair: $1.14 million
Hatfield: Marine Mammal Institute’s Research Vessel: $350,000
Lincoln City: D River Welcome Center: $2.547 million
Lincoln City: Cultural Center Plaza: $1.8 million
Lincoln City: Devils Lake Water Vegetation and Algae Control: $310,000
Lincoln City: Taft Sports Complex and Park: $1 million
Otis: well/water/wastewater/septic recovery – $12 million

Floating Wind Energy Blows Out: Offshore wind looked like a sure thing for Oregon — until it wasn’t.

Oregon needs more clean, renewable energy. And we certainly want the good jobs that come with such projects. But plans to build floating wind energy farms in federal waters off the south-central coast generated more questions than answers.

A computer-generated representation of a floating offshore wind turbine. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management planned to auction off sites off the Southern Oregon coast to develop this technology but has postponed those plans indefinitely.

Local communities were worried about effects on livability and viewsheds. Tribes sued, seeking a delay and more information on impacts. Environmentalists struggled to balance energy opportunities with harm to the marine environment and marine life. Local fleets argued that the wind farms would decimate the fishing industry.

We held half-a-dozen public forums. The Legislative Coastal Caucus, which I chair, asked the federal government for delays. I co-sponsored legislation requiring better planning, standards to be considered, and community/tribal involvement in the process. And I even joined an Oregon delegation to learn more about similar wind farms in Scotland.

Legislators, labor, researchers and advocates reviewed wind farms in Scotland in September.

The push to bring floating offshore wind technology to the Oregon coast was gaining momentum. And then, in a single week in late September — after years of effort, and less than three weeks before federal officials expected to choose a company to develop offshore wind — everything fell apart. It was a combination of many factors — including upfront costs, a lack of market, concerns from local impacted residents, and a lack of state-level support. In late September, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management canceled plans for an October auction.

The Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development is currently hosting Oregon Offshore Wind Energy Roadmap meetings, with ongoing engagement and a final report planned for November 2025. BOEM has postponed its plans indefinitely.

Ground Breaking and Ribbon Cuttings: Nothing signals progress more than ground breaking and ribbon cuttings. And our district is seeing plenty of both!

I can think of no better example than the Philomath Downtown Safety and Streetscape Improvements Project. ODOT invested $18 million and two years of work to add sidewalks and vegetation, improve pedestrian and bicycle access, improve traffic safety, create an attractive people-friendly, pedestrian-oriented downtown, and generally enhance the appearance of the highway at the edge of our district – all with traffic whizzing through and businesses trying to stay open.

I was there for the groundbreaking two years ago and happily returned for the ribbon cutting on a wet afternoon in November.

It takes money, but it also takes vision and leadership at so many different levels along the stretch of a project to make these kinds of things come to fruition. Retiring Mayor Chas Jones can be proud!

There were plenty of other groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings throughout 2024. That included:

Oregon State University and its Hatfield Marine Science Center $16.5 million, 77-unit apartment project for students, faculty, and researchers.
Schooner Creek Discovery Park – the first new Lincoln City Park in over 20 years.
A new Lincoln County Animal Shelter in Waldport.
Paul J. Cochran Veterans Memorial Park in Philomath.
Newport Performing Arts Center Improvements ribbon cutting.
Ed Johann Veterans Plaza dedication in Lincoln City.
Habitat for Humanity home openings.
And a bevy of new businesses and enterprises.

No Taxes on Wildfire Recovery: Otis is still recovering from the 2020 wildfires that transformed the landscape and left 300 of our neighbors without homes. Hundreds more were impacted or traumatized with evacuations, loss of barns, outbuildings and wells, damaged roads, and the loss of thousands of trees.

Recovery has been slow. On my own street where one-third of the homes were lost, half have not yet rebuilt.

Part of that recovery process involves settlements and lawsuits against those deemed responsible for the fires. But as some of those cases concluded, we were astounded to learn that awards were all taxable. And with settlements received all in one year, that meant that survivors might suddenly find themselves in the highest tax bracket of their lives and owe as much of one-third the money to the state and Feds that was intended to help them recover and rebuild.

Oregon reacted pretty quickly. Early this year, I was a chief sponsor of Senate Bill 1520 which exempted amounts received in wildfire litigation from Oregon taxes. And then in December, Congress passed the Federal Disaster Tax Relief Act. This legislation exempts wildfire relief payments from federal income taxes. The legislation also streamlines the process for deducting losses from various natural disasters and includes provisions to exempt taxation on legal fees, emotional distress, lost wages, and other expenses linked to wildfire losses.

At the same time, Oregon passed House Bill 1545 protecting many whose homes were destroyed in 2020 wildfires from potentially massive property tax increases after they rebuild, if county leaders in their communities agree.

Wildfires again devastated Oregon in 2024. They were the largest and most expensive in Oregon’s history. But the difference between 2020 and 2024 is that in 2024, fires largely burned rangelands. In 2020 they burned neighborhoods.

Plant Closures and Layoffs: Oregon employers laid off thousands of workers this past year — a big departure from the pandemic’s immediate aftermath when a broad labor shortage made major layoffs rare.

Our large district was not immune.

Western Cascade Industries’ mill — which employs 54 people at its 25-year-old site in Toledo closed in August. The property and other assets will be auctioned in March.
Bornstein Seafoods, a major seafood processor permanently closed its plant on the Newport bayfront in May, laying off 50 workers and consolidating its operations in Astoria.
Interfor Corporation announced in February that it would indefinitely curtail its sawmill operations in Philomath, laying off about 100 employees, “in response to persistent high log costs in the region and ongoing weak lumber market conditions”. The Philomath sawmill and planing mill has been acquired by Portland-based Timberlab.

Western Cascade, Bornstein and Interfor closed this year, laying off roughly 200 workers.

Early last week I toured the Western Cascade site with Ross Stock and Toledo Council President Kim Bush. The stories were troubling and the concern for former workers real.

Despite the layoffs, Oregon’s workforce grew by more than 20,000 jobs in the past 12 months and the state’s unemployment rate remained around 4.0% throughout the year. State economists think Oregon’s workforce will continue to grow in the years ahead. I’m not sure how comforting that is to workers upended by these local closures.

Coos Bay May Boom Again: There was a time when ships left Coos Bay daily loaded with lumber destined for foreign ports. Then the forest products industry changed, shipping declined and jobs evaporated.

The Port of Coos Bay now has plans to jump start their regional economy and build a major deep-water container terminal.

The $2.3 billion project would create a massive facility where ships drop off 20 to 40-foot-long shipping containers full of goods from across the Pacific Ocean and transport them throughout much of the western half of the nation. The only other such service in the state is more than 200 miles away in Portland. But Portland is upriver and cannot accommodate the oversized vessels now typical in the industry. Together, Portland can service smaller local container needs while Coos Bay becomes a fourth deepwater port on the West Coast.

It lies outside our House district, but any major developments on the central coast affect all of us. That’s why I took the lead in 2023 to negotiate and carry a 2023 bill in the Oregon Legislature to support container terminal plans.

Lawmakers also approved the allocation of $40 million toward what’s called the Pacific Coast Intermodal Port (PCIP) Project. The money helped fund the dredging and expansion of the existing waterway to accommodate the large container ships.

Containers arriving in Coos Bay could be loaded directly onto trains, reducing the carbon impact by more than 50%.

In Coos Bay, the overseas goods would travel by rail to other parts of the country. Meanwhile, containers full of lentils, hay, animal feed, wood products and other Oregon agricultural goods would be loaded from rail cars onto the large cargo ships headed for other countries. While the project still has a ways to go, it won two grants this year of $29 million in federal funding for planning upgrades to the railroad and a $25 million award for planning work on the channel.

The port plan will bring 2,500 permanent jobs and 2,500 temporary construction jobs to the area.

Preparing to be Better Prepared: A major earthquake is in our future and I worry we aren’t ready. In May, I attended Oregon’s largest Cascadia preparedness exercise at the Newport Airport.

In the event of an emergency, the airport will serve as an evacuation assembly point or EAP. The site, which takes around 4 hours to set up, can hold around 80 people for up to 2 weeks. The strategy is to remove people who require a higher level of care from the area after a large-scale event. There are dorms for people to stay in, there’s a food tent, a command tent, a Wi-Fi generator, showers, and a medical tent.

I am very supportive of exercises like this and investments in the equipment that is stored in readiness for an emergency event. But I’m also harshly realistic about the scope of challenges we face. Two or three caches of tents and food along the Coast are not enough. Support for 80 people is not enough. And as I pointed out in my remarks, there are six bridges between my house and this facility that won’t be standing when Cascadia arrives.

We need facilities like this in every community in Oregon to be well prepared for the whims of Mother Nature, whether it’s an earthquake, fire, or a major freeze. And each family needs an individual plan as well because government won’t be here to help you immediately after something happens and lots of people are going to need that help.

I continue to believe the Coast is better prepared than most of Oregon. But I don’t think we are well prepared. We have a lot of work to do.

There you have it – eight big stories that affect you, your family, your pocketbook, and your future. Let’s continue to work together to make our special part of Oregon better, safer, stronger, and more special. I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

I’ll be back next week with more current local news.