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MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm Michael Dunne. The 2025, regular session of the Oregon Legislature has come and gone, but the wrangling and deal making will have to continue next month, as the Governor has called for a special session because the House and Senate didn't get everything they need done. So an already weary group of legislators will be heading back to Salem to try and hammer out a deal on transportation funding. Today, on the show, we'll check in with Eugene's representative and Speaker of the House, Julie Fahy, and hear what she thinks about the wins and the losses in the session. Some important movements on housing, mental health and education occurred, and the session was not disrupted by any walkouts or large-scale partisan stunts. But as mentioned, the huge transportation funding package was left stranded at the station. Oregon House Speaker Julie Fahey, thanks so much for coming in and talking with us.
JULIE FAHEY: Thank you so much for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: The regular legislative session ended. I'd love to get your general impressions of how things went.
JULIE FAHEY: I'm very proud of what we were able to accomplish this session. We really wanted to focus on what are the big issues that are important to Oregonians, what are the big issues facing our state? So that's from everything from the cost of living to improving our schools, access to healthcare, which is really important here in Lane County and public safety. I'm also really proud of the work we did on housing and homelessness this session. So, obviously, we had a tough budget year. We had a lot coming at us from the federal government about the economic chaos caused by the new Trump administration. And so, it wasn't always an easy session, but we really stayed focused on the work and trying to deliver for Oregon.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Tell our listeners about your job. Talk about what the speaker does, specifically around, like you said, a lot of challenges, some you can't control, but obviously you know, holding your caucus together, all those things talk about, you know, how it all works from your view.
JULIE FAHEY: Well, first off, heading into a legislative session, we, the presiding officers, the speaker and the Senate President, talk about with our colleagues about what should the priorities be? What should the big marquee pieces of legislation that we passed in the session be? So, this session, it was protecting funding for Medicaid, it was reforming our civil commitment laws. It's obviously a transportation package that we're going to talk more about later. And it was, you know, housing, making sure the housing, homelessness crisis is being addressed. So, setting the priorities is one job of the speaker, and then we are also sort of the CEOs of the legislature as a branch. So, we, you know, there are, there's the finance team and the IT team and the legal team. We run the legislature as one state agency as well, so lots of decisions around construction and things like that, that report up to us during the session. You know, we manage the flow of bills. We try to make sure, we manage our committee chairs, to make sure that they are properly vetting the bills and their committees, and that we have, you know, a good story to tell about each of the issues that are important to Oregonians.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Contextualize for our audience, the difference between the short session and the regular session in terms of management, obviously compressed period of time for the short session, but obviously, maybe with that pressure of time comes an ease of passing bills. How do you view it?
JULIE FAHEY: There's both the scope of the issues we're able to address and how many big things we are able to address. In the last short session, we took on campaign finance reform, reforming measure 110, and, you know, a housing and homelessness package. And so those were the, those were sort of the big marquee things that the presiding officers put our weight behind. Okay, we had a long, much longer list of things this session, you know, including wildfire funding and schools and behavioral health care. So the number and the scope of the issues you're able to take on is different because of the compressed timeline. But it is true that, you know, focus, and I particularly like that there are fewer bills that can be introduced in a short session. In the long session, I've been a proponent of Bill limits in the long session for a long time. We need to be able to focus our work and set real priorities, and so the limited time and the limited number of bills helps us do that in a short session.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I know that there are, there are certain bills you're excited about, and let's kind of take them one at a time here. Let's start with, you know, there was a measure, a bipartisan measure, on housing and homelessness reforms. Talk about that.
JULIE FAHEY: Well, it is true. We need to build more housing in the state of Oregon. We are short over 100,000 homes in the state to meet the need, and so for the last about eight years, the legislature has really steadily been doing that work to knock down barriers to constructing more homes. This session, we were focused on removing barriers for middle housing, so making sure middle housing, like duplexes and triplexes can be cited more places around the state. We reformed our condo liability laws that were many years in the making to try and make it easier to construct condos as a form of housing, and we did some really creative things. We invested in modular and manufactured homes and made sure those homes could be sited in more places around the state to try and amp up our construction. And I was particularly excited about a bill we passed called Oregon homes that will provide template designs for single family homes that will both streamline the design and the permitting process for developers around the state. So, we did make a lot of good progress on constructing more homes, and a lot of that work is by almost the majority of that work bipartisan, because Republicans and Democrats alike understand that. You know, building more homes is key to solving our housing crisis.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Another big priority you sort of teed up. But let's talk some more about it. And it's something that comes up a lot, is reforms and improvements around behavioral health. Talk about that as well.
JULIE FAHEY: We passed a landmark piece of legislation this session, House Bill 2005 that had some major reforms of our behavioral health care statutes. The first component of it was reforms to our civil commitment laws. This is when someone is unable to win, you know, as a danger to themselves or others. Under what circumstances can a family member or the justice system make, you know, commit, have civil commitment, and we have been working on that for years. The legislature has tried many times to reform those laws, and this was the session, we finally got it done. So it is, it is really important to be able to get people access to the care that they need. But that's not enough, you know, we reform our civil commitment laws, you know, make it easier to get folks the care that they need, but you also need, we also need to keep up our focus on building more facilities and making sure we have a sufficient behavioral health workforce. So, we continued that work this session, investing in our workforce to grow it here in Lane County, we made an investment in our behavioral health stabilization center through the county. I'll be really excited when that is able to come online, hopefully in the next couple of years, to provide a place for folks who are experiencing mental health crises to go and to decompress. That is not a jail or a hospital.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Talk about some of these education investments, because obviously that's been top of mind for many people.
JULIE FAHEY: Funding and operating our K 12 schools, making sure they have the support that they need. That is one of the top responsibilities of the legislature. So, I'm really proud of the work we did this session on that we passed a record setting investment in our K 12 schools. It's about $11.4 billion to the state school fund, the largest investment in state history, those dollars support everything from classroom instruction to special education and mental health, you know, nutrition, student transportation, especially important in light of some of the cuts to federal funding that we might see in the education space. Also importantly, we paired that record investment with significant reforms to our accountability system here in Oregon, we need to make sure that the investments that we are making in our schools are being used effectively and efficiently. And so it established a statewide framework for student progress and school improvement, and importantly, support for those districts in those schools that are really struggling to deliver for their students. And then lastly, one of the key pieces of education that I was most excited about was investments in our summer learning programs. We made permanent investments in summer learning so that districts can plan and we focus those investments on literacy, so kids who are behind in reading can help get caught up. The Bethel School District here, right here in Eugene, was a shining star with their summer literacy program last summer, and their work served as a model for, you know, people in Salem saying we need to bring this statewide. They are getting results for their kids. It's a very well-designed program, so I was really proud of bringing that work statewide.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Yeah, obviously, you know, there's still lags in the system. A lot because of Covid and stuff. I wanted to ask sort of a general question about education reform is just, what other things would you like to see the legislature do, whether it's maybe it can't be in this short in this special session, but the next session, what are some other things that you'd like to get to around education reform for Oregon?
JULIE FAHEY: I would really like us to focus as a state on the things that are research backed that research shows makes a difference in student learning. And so, we know summer learning was one of those things. Extra time in school for those kids who are struggling is really important, whether that's through summer programming or after school programming or high dosage tutoring, I think there's more that we could do on high dosage tutoring that explain that what high dose, high dosage tutoring? That means tutoring that, thank you. That means tutoring that is intensive, okay, so either in its frequency or in its length, that it's not just, you know, once a week for 20 minutes. The research shows that that has really helped kids catch up in other states from pandemic learning loss. So I really think, you know, we should be. Oregon is a unique state in many ways, and there are challenges in education that other states are facing. We can look to other states and what they are doing that is successful and not successful, and try and bring those practices here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Let's talk also about healthcare access, providing better access to healthcare. You talked about the stabilization center. Talk about some other things that you worked on in this session.
JULIE FAHEY: Well, the first major piece of legislation we passed this session was a bill to renew our funding structure for the Oregon Health Plan. That's Oregon's Medicaid program. One in three Oregonians get their health care through Medicaid. It's incredibly important program, both in terms of providing access to health care for Oregonians, but also the funding helps stabilize our hospitals, particularly our rural hospitals, and that was a very important thing for us to do early on, given all of the chaos we've seen out of the federal government around potential cuts to Medicaid. So, we wanted to make sure that, in the face of that, we were stabilizing our system here in Oregon, first, we also the other piece of major legislation we passed was a bill to reform what we call our corporate practice of medicine law. So here in Eugene in Lane County, we saw Optum United Healthcare come in and buy the Oregon Medical Group A few years ago, and what that meant was limited access to care. I myself no longer have a primary care provider, and apparently, I'm about to lose my OB GYN as well, because Oregon Medical Group is closing their OB GYN practice. So, we saw here locally, people losing access to care because of this big corporation coming in and purchasing an independent clinic. So, in the legislature, we took that experience and we reformed our laws around saying that physicians are the ones that need to make decisions about the care for their patients. We now have the strongest corporate practice of medicine law in the country, meaning that it limits the influence that corporations can have on the actual medical decision-making process.
MICHAEL DUNNE: You got a lot of wins. Didn't get everything. Let's talk about the transportation package. It's one of the reasons why there's a special session, maybe armchair quarterback for us, sort of what happened with that?
JULIE FAHEY: Yeah. So, we came into the session knowing that our transportation system is at risk, we are one of the lowest funding states on the west coast in terms of how much in resources we devote to our transportation system when compared to the other West Coast states. And as more people are moving to electric vehicles, that means fewer people are paying the gas tax. So, Oregon was one of the first states in the country to institute a gas tax over 100 years ago, and it worked great, and now we are needing to think about a way to modernize how we fund our transportation system. Okay, so that's the problem that we came into the session knowing that we needed to address. We worked. We worked for the year leading up to the session. We had a, you know, road show all around the state to listen to communities about what their needs were and how they want to pay for transportation infrastructure. You know, we had work groups heading into the session all about, how do we make sure our roads and our bridges and our transit systems have the funding that they need? So we propose what we thought was a solution to that problem. We're seeing all these needs. House Bill 2025, the transportation package this session, was a comprehensive solution to all of those challenges, and unfortunately, it didn't have the support to pass in the Senate. So, then we said in the house, we said, Okay, what's a stop gap measure just to prevent these layoffs that we're seeing at ODOT, and we weren't able to pass that in the final days of the session because of some procedural moves by the Republicans. So now we're at a point, you know, we just during the session without a transportation package, and then, you know what we had been talking about would happen? What has been happening, which is that ODOT workers around the state are getting layoff notices, including here in Lane County, the Vaneta maintenance shop is scheduled. Close. And so, since the close of session, about three and a half weeks ago, I have been working nonstop with the governor and with the Senate President to talk through what could a special session look like? What would a scaled down version that would solve our more immediate term needs look like to pass in a special session? And the governor recently announced that we'll be coming in on August 29 to do that.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, before I ask you about this special session, this is an overly simplistic question, but obviously the Democrats, you're, you're in charge. You have the majorities in both houses. How, you know? How did you lose the support to be able to push this through? What kind of things were some of the things that just seemed to not be able to get pushed through, or opinions and votes that couldn't happen?
JULIE FAHEY: Well, I think any time that we are, you know, voting to increase funding, raise taxes, there's a robust conversation about that and what, how do we balance the impact on everyday families with the required services that, you know, as that Oregonians all expect, roads, bridges, schools, healthcare, sorts of things. So, we had many robust conversations about, how do you balance those needs? How can we balance the need to make sure our potholes are filled and our roads are plowed and our, you know, our streets are striped so that they can be safe with, you know, not wanting to overly burden working families and making sure that you know we were not putting all of our eggs in one basket, right? We couldn't just increase our gas tax we had, what we proposed was a balance of different funding tools so that you know we weren't, we weren't sort of putting the burden all in one place.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Here's a kind of a philosophical question. It seems to me, since your speakership, the tone in Salem has gotten better. It seems like there's less, I don't know, performative politics. I get it. I imagine there are heated arguments and disagreements over policy. But is that a fair assessment?
JULIE FAHEY: Well, we didn't have a walkout this session, which I count as a big win, okay, I had walkouts, obviously in 2019 Republican walkouts in 2019 2020, and 2023, okay, that. And part of that is my philosophy about governing is that good ideas can come from anywhere, and if you are someone who is willing to sit down and do the work, there will be a seat at the table for you, regardless of what your party is or what your ideology is. There are so many problems that are not partisan. Problems in this state. The housing supply we already talked about is one of them. But how do we manage our water resources? You know, behavioral health, that civil commitment law was a bipartisan effort, that there are, there is enough work to go around. And so, I really took that to heart when I became a speaker. And, you know, I made a we have Republicans who are co-chairs of policy, co-chair of a policy committee. We have a Republican who's co-chairing a budget subcommittee as well. And really, if you're willing to roll up your sleeves and do the work, there will be a seat for you. And I think that making sure that people, regardless of what party you're in, have a meaningful voice in the process, is really important to me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, this special session, is it elastic? Do you guys get to set the terms? How long is it going to be? You know, kind of, obviously, do you kind of build the aircraft as it's flying? How does it work?
JULIE FAHEY: Well, it's really important that when you go into a special session, the proposal has been talked about, that it has support. All the feedback has been received and incorporated before you hit the floor in a special session, because the goal is to keep them as short as possible. Okay, in the past, you know, in the pandemic, we had five special sessions. That was a lot, and all of them were very heavily negotiated headed into the session about what we would take up, what we wouldn't take up, with the hopes of keeping them relatively short and on track. So that's the same thing that we are doing now. Lots of conversations about what people want to see, what they don't want to see, in any proposal that we'd bring forward in the special session care to crystal ball, how, what the outcome will be. Well, I'm very confident in our ability to pass something that will address the near term needs of ODOT at the state level, our cities and counties and our transit systems, the conversations are going very well.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, you know, speaker, my last question for you is this, there has been so much tension around what's happening at the federal government. You know, layoffs that are impacting jobs here in Oregon, cuts everywhere. I'm wondering, you know, as a leader of a state, legislate, legislature, you know, are there times when you feel like, boy, you know, we may have to do things to protect Oregonians that perhaps we didn't really think about or we ever thought would be necessary, you know, 5,10, years ago?
JULIE FAHEY: I think that's right, both from a policy perspective and from a budget perspective. We. It has been very top of mind the last seven months. What do we need to do to respond to what's coming out of the federal government? From a policy perspective, this session, we passed a handful of bills that would protect immigrants from discrimination, that would make sure that data privacy is protected. We passed a sweeping data privacy measure that is important in its own right, but particularly important for those who are seeking abortion or gender affirming care in the current climate. From a budget perspective, I'm very concerned about the impact of the federal legislation, HR one, the big, ugly bill, on our budget, state budget here in Oregon and on all the many organized local governments, schools, nonprofits that rely on federal funding to do really important work for Oregonians, we will see cuts to federal funding in healthcare, in education, in Emergency Preparedness and states are, unfortunately, our budgets are not set up to backfill all of those cuts that we will see coming from the federal government. So that's really the next round of work that we're going to need to do in the legislature is analyzing the impact of that federal legislation and how we're going to need to respond. And I'm worried that when we see cuts to Medicaid, when we see cut to cuts to snap food assistance, that Oregonians will be harmed.
MICHAEL DUNNE: House Speaker Julie Fahey, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming in and talking about the legislative session that was, and the special session that will be.
JULIE FAHEY: Thank you, Michael.
MICHAEL DUNNE: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear from the director of Oregon State Parks and hear how they are looking for creative partnerships with private industry to help make up for funding shortfalls to keep the parks pristine and operating. I'm Michael Dunne, and this has been Oregon On The Record from KLCC. Thanks for listening.
