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BY DAVID SMIGELSKI
dsmigelski@wweek.com
And legislators wonder why people don't trust them.
Last week, as headlines focused on a budget deal between House and Senate leaders that clears the way for record spending on education, legislators posed in front of TV cameras, boasting about how they had put kids first.
Then, when the spotlight was turned off, legislators went about helping the people who really matter to them--timber companies, utilities, the farm lobby and themselves.
In one wild week of deal making and deal breaking, the Legislature:
* Crafted measures to allow legislators to challenge voter-approved term-limits and ignore campaign-contribution reporting deadlines while passing a bill that allows farmworkers to be fired for complaining about wages and working conditions.
* Added a $50 million tax break for timber companies while cutting $66 million from a tax break for the working poor.
* Exempted nearly $760 million worth of utility-company property from taxes while virtually ignoring thousands of legal immigrants who are scheduled to lose $55 million worth of welfare and food stamp benefits Aug. 1.
Given the governor's opposition to some of these bills, it's not clear how many will ultimately become law. Taken together, however, they paint a telling picture of the 1997 Legislature.
"We're passing some very self-serving legislation," complains Rep. Jo Ann Bowman, a Portland Democrat, noting the effort to circumvent term limits and weaken penalties for filing late campaign-contribution reports. "We're telling voters to let us stay as long as we want to stay, but don't make us responsible for reporting where we get our campaign contributions.
"When we look back at the end result of this session, we'll see it wasn't the people that mattered," she says. "It's the timber and utility companies that matter. It's the 'haves' who matter. But will we have made the state a better place for working people? No."
The most divisive piece of legislation passed last week was Senate Bill 1205, which says agricultural workers--most of whom are Latino--can't sue their employers if they are fired for complaining about wages or working conditions.
The bill, which Gov. John Kitzhaber has promised to veto, caused state Treasurer Jim Hill, the state's highest-ranking black official, to fire off a letter accusing the Legislature of being racist.
"What this bill reminds me of are the stories my mother and grandmother used to tell me about their experiences picking cotton when racial discrimination was the law of the land in the South," Hill wrote. "These laws had only one purpose: Keep them niggers down and in their place. The only difference is that SB 1205 is aimed at brown people instead of black."
While lawmakers were trying to make it easier for farm owners to fire field workers, they quietly crafted a bill that will make it harder for voters to fire them. Twenty-four legislators are scheduled for elimination next year because of a term-limits law voters passed in 1992. Legislators initially said they were going to send the measure back to the ballot in November, asking voters to relax the limits. But when it became clear in recent weeks that voters were likely to trash the measure, lawmakers took a different tack, passing a law that lets them appeal term limits to the courts, where they believe they have a better chance of winning.
As those measures proceeded, timber lobbyists were helping to write state tax policy. Earlier in the session, timber companies were rebuffed for trying to slide a tax break into Measure 50, the property-tax rewrite that voters approved in May. Republican leaders were lauded at the time for standing up to the timber companies. But as soon as Measure 50 passed, those same Republicans started working with timber lobbyists behind the scenes.
The result is a 55 percent reduction in timber taxes. Under current law, timber companies pay $94 million each biennium in severance and property taxes. The Legislature voted this week to eliminate the severance tax, reducing timber-tax collections to just $42 million. Combined with other breaks the timber industry has received in recent years, timber taxes will have decreased 91 percent since 1990.
"I guess the way to plead poverty in this state is to call yourself a timber company," says Chuck Sheketoff, an anti-poverty activist from the Oregon Law Center.
Sheketoff is particularly incensed by the timber tax break. And with good reason. He helped fashion a $100 million tax break for the working poor that passed the Senate Revenue Committee earlier in the session. But this week, as the timber lobbyists got their $50 million windfall, he watched legislators chop his proposed break for the poor to $34 million.
That's not all. On Saturday, the House surprised many people by approving another tax break--this one for utility companies--that had appeared to be dead. Under Oregon law, utility companies pay taxes on "intangible property," such as FCC licenses, custom software and franchises--items that are hard to classify but add millions to the value of a business. The Legislature eliminated the intangibles tax on $760 million worth of property owned by utility companies, even though state tax experts say they have no way to estimate how much money it will cost the state in the long run. What they do know, however, is that according to figures from the Legislative Revenue Office, the utilities tax break will shift $10 million in taxes onto the backs of homeowners.
While legislators were handing out breaks to the wealthy, roughly 14,000 legal immigrants were left to fend for themselves. Under federal welfare reform, thousands of immigrants will lose nearly $46 million in medical and food-stamp benefits. After much hand-wringing and talk about priorities, legislators could find just $5 million in a $9.6 billion budget to care for the state's poorest workers.
Veteran Salem watchers say a Legislature's true colors show at the end of the session, when bills get rammed through without the normal deliberation. "If we give money to poor people, we spend hours or weeks discussing it from all sides," says lobbyist Gerry Bieberle, who represents a coalition of human-service providers. "But we can give millions of dollars away to timber companies with no inspection. Who knows if the corporations really need those breaks, because they never get the inspection that [human-services] issues get."
Rep. Tom Brian, chairman of the House Revenue Committee, defends the timber and utility tax break that his committee passed, saying it's a matter of fairness. Homeowners are going to get at least a 10 percent reduction in their property taxes because of Measure 47, the property-tax cut and cap that voters approved last fall. Timber companies deserve the same breaks, Brian says.
The Tigard Republican bristled, however, when it was pointed out that timber taxes would be cut far more than homeowner taxes under the measure he shepherded, resulting in a 91 percent timber-tax cut since 1990.
"You're getting caught up in percentages," Brian retorted. "It's not about percentages. It's about fairness."
Bowman disagrees. "It's not about fairness," she counters. "It's about having the influence to be able to pay the least amount of tax possible. The average person has to see that this process is set up to favor those in the process."
"The Legislature is dominated by white, middle-aged males who are either in business or are connected to people in business," says Sen. Avel Gordly, one of three black women in the 90-member Legislature. "That's what drives this process."
"I wouldn't call it racist," says Rep. Judy Uherbelau, an Ashland Democrat. "But we seem to have more willingness to vote for things that have negative impacts on the most vulnerable people in the state--the unheard and under-represented."
Brian says it's unfair to link issues like farmworker rights and term limits, or timber taxes and welfare cuts, no matter how bad it looks. "You're putting those things together, I'm not," he told WW. "They're all separate issues. I'll let someone else focus on perceptions. I'm focusing on policy."
Gubernatorial aide Mark Gibson, however, says he, too, sees a pattern. "It's not an artificial construct to put those things together," says Gibson, who advises Gov. John Kitzhaber on health and human services, "because ultimately it says something very important about the relative priorities of the Legislature. When we start talking about tax breaks for industries that have already received preferential tax treatment, many of whom will be getting a large part of the kicker that goes back, it does say a lot about the people pushing those programs forward."
Farm lobbyists introduced Senate Bill 1205 in response to a Washington County court decision that said 11 employees of Oregon Roses Inc. were wrongfully fired for complaining about their wages. Federal law already allows employers to prohibit farmworkers from unionizing. SB 1205 takes it a step further, saying they can't even discuss their wages or working conditions.
Senate Bill 1062 is one of 14 corporate tax breaks the Legislature passed that shifts the tax burden to homeowners.
Timber lobbyists say the old taxing system was set up to compensate Oregonians for the loss of old-growth trees. Now that the emphasis is on second- and third-growth trees, they say they should be taxed less.
11,700 legal immigrants in Oregon are scheduled to lose food-stamp benefits in August under federal welfare revisions, and 2,996 will lose monthly Supplemental Security Income checks. The $5 million set aside by the Oregon Legislature this week will provide partial help to roughly 1,000 of those people.
MICHAEL OLFERTFarm laborers and low-income workers lost ground in the Legislature last week.> > >POLITICS WW NEWSWW NEWSPOLITICS
CHARLES GULLUNGLawmakers' end-of-session gifts included big tax breaks for timber companies and utilities. |
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