Killing Good Ideas in Secret
By Rep. Greg Macpherson (D-Lake Oswego & SW Portland). Previously, he contributed "Crimes of a few hurt all elected officials".
Legislative proposals come from varied sources. As a state representative, I’m always on the look-out for good ideas.
One such idea emerged from a Rotary meeting I attended a year ago. Before the reader assumes this will be an uplifting story of legislative success, I’ll warn you otherwise. This column tells of legislative failure.
The head of Stop Oregon Litter and Vandalism (SOLV) spoke at that meeting about the volume of trash dumped onto Oregon’s beaches and other open spaces. He remarked on the striking number of old auto tires found in that trash. SOLV volunteers pick up tons of old tires.
This connected with an experience I recalled from a metro area clean-up several years ago. I pulled over a dozen old tires out of the brush in a ravine near Happy Valley.
Old tires thrown into open spaces obviously are unsightly. Rainwater collecting inside them breeds mosquitoes. They also present an environmental hazard as they deteriorate, releasing chemicals into the soil.
I researched the issue and found that Oregon was once a national leader in tire recycling. In 1995-96 Oregon achieved a 98 percent recovery rate for scrap tires. This success was driven by a $1 fee tire dealers were required to collect on worn-out tires removed from motor vehicles. The fee went to a state account to support clean up of dumped tires and to develop uses for them.
But the market for scrap tires worsened and they started going mostly to landfills. The Legislature let the $1 fee expire and later raided the funds remaining in the state account to balance the budget.
Now we lag behind other states in tire recycling. The recovery rate for scrap tires in Oregon dropped to 32 percent by 2000.
Worse still, the state has become a destination for old tires. By 2000 half the tires going into Oregon landfills were coming in from out of state. And too many old tires get dumped illegally.
In response to this problem, I introduced House Bill 2906 this year. The bill would reestablish the $1 fee on each tire at the point of sale to support clean-up of old tires and promote recycling.
I was surprised when the House Speaker referred the bill to the Committee on Business, Labor and Consumer Affairs rather than the Environment Committee. Then I realized that the BLC Committee was chaired by Rep. Alan Brown (R – Newport), who owns a tire dealership.
In the Oregon Legislature chairs hold the power of life and death over bills referred to their committees. Rep. Brown wouldn’t even allow a hearing on HB 2906, let alone bring it to a committee vote.
When I met with him to request a hearing, it was clear that Rep. Brown does not believe the decline in tire recycling and the growth of illegal tire dumping is a problem.
My purpose is not to criticize Rep. Brown, who did what many other committee chairs have done. The problem is with a system that gives the chair of a committee veto power over the bills referred there.
A proposal to regain Oregon’s leadership in waste tire recycling deserved a hearing. Oregonians should tell their lawmakers that they want an open debate on the issues facing the state, not power politics that kill good proposals in secret.
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Dec. 12, 2005
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8:13 a.m.
Dec 12, '05
Greg,
This is a great story. It also sounds like solid legislation and I really hope that you bring it back up in the next session. Hopefully Mr. Brown will not be in a position to block it next time.
Dec 12, '05
Greg,
Why wasn't the Oregonian or Statesman-Journal on this story?
Why wasn't this publicized during the legislative session?
Why didn't the Democrats file a discharge petition?
11:32 a.m.
Dec 12, '05
The reality of tire recycling on the ground has been that you have to pay a tire store (say Les Schwab) a fee to take your old tires off of your hands.
As a rural resident, I drive by tires, old funiture, and assorted crap every day on my way to and from town. People are always pissed off when they have to pay to get rid of garbage anyway, so any program going forward should offer some small incentive to the person who has to decide how to get rid of the tire
Absent ethical consideration, a person faced with driving to Sandy and paying a tire company to take your designated toxic waste off of their hads or driving down the road to my house and pitching your tires into the brush on the blind curve, will do the latter every time.
Dec 12, '05
Maybe an idea like the bottle bill? Hit them with a $1 tire deposit at purchase, and refund when returned for recycling?
-Guy
12:06 p.m.
Dec 12, '05
Guy--
Maybe a bigger deposit? On a big item like a tire, $1 may not be enough to get people to return them. But maybe a couple bucks?
Then again you'll get people who will go around cleaning up tires and taking them in just to get the money. Maybe it'll help clean up tires the way it has soda cans.
Dec 12, '05
I agree with Pat Ryan and Guy Mann. The fee should be charged when you buy the tires, rather than when do the right thing and recycle the tires. But Rep. Macphearsons’s main point still stands: chairs have a lot of power to silently kill bills.
12:24 p.m.
Dec 12, '05
CLP--
Definitely. They have way too much power to kill bills. And the speaker has too much power to put bills in the wrong committee just so they'll never see the light of day.
Dec 12, '05
Definitely. They have way too much power to kill bills. And the speaker has too much power to put bills in the wrong committee just so they'll never see the light of day.
All the more reason to elect not only a Democratic House but make it clear legislators have a responsibility to the general public and not just to industry/ interest groups that want bills silently killed in ocmmittee.
1:34 p.m.
Dec 12, '05
Then again, there are literally hundreds of bills introduced each session. I've been told by more than one pro that leaders of either party tend to want only those bills that have some realistic chance of passage to be allowed out of committee just as a matter of practicality given the part time nature of our legislature.
Of course, leadership can also use this option as a weapon to kill bills that they oppose, but that the rank and file of their own party may support which (I assume) is Greg's point regarding partisanship around these decisions. It seems like it'll be kinda tough to get to a place where it'll be automatic that the bill declaring Klingon as the official language of Oregon gets sent to the dumper, while the bill to preserve the rights of innocent and tender forest fungi gets sent to the floor for consideration.
How can we preserve the idea of meaningful debate on important bills, while weeding out the demagogic and useless ones?
Hint: I have no idea, so the above question is not rhetorical.
2:10 p.m.
Dec 12, '05
My thoughts would be first to make sure the committee the bill is sent to is indeed the appropriate committee. Often times this is the way they kill bills.
Also not killing the rules that allow the members of the House to pull a bill out of committee is a good way to start as well. When you have the ability to remove bills from committee, even when the chair is stalling it, you make it easier for important bills to make it to a vote.
A lot of organizations I've been involved in with in the past will allow you to bring an item that has been stalled in committee (or dropped by a committee) if you can get a certain percentage/number of signatures on a petition. Similarly you can just have a quick vote to see if you should pull the item out of committee.
I don't think that vote necessarily needs to be a majority-- after all that still does nothing to keep the majority from killing important bills. Maybe 40%?
Then you can get a yes/no vote on the item and move on.
Dec 12, '05
As I understand it, there is a debate in a committee of the Legislative Comm. about discharge petitions and that sort of thing.
A friend of mine who was a House staffer told me about the institution of "tap tap"--opening a committee hearing on a bill, maybe having 5 minutes of hearing on a bill they don't think will go anywhere and then closing the hearing, but at least it had a courtesy hearing. Sounds like the bill Macpherson talks about didn't even get that.
There is also an abuse on the other side of the equation.
Check out HB 2978-2982 from the 2003 session. These bills would never have passed a 15-15 Senate, they were basically union busting bills. One was putting in statute what topics would be valid for teacher negotiations---at a time when administrator pay or any other detail was not being publicly discussed. My guess is that there would have been the proverbial "blood on the House floor" if these had ever come up for debate, and "moderates" would have been considered anything but if they had voted for these bills.
But as I recall, Rep. Patridge (who sponsored the bills) was buddies with the House Majority Leader. So the bills got at least one hearing or work session almost each month the 2003 Legislature was in session. I only found out about them because I was in the capitol one day and walked by one of those closed circuit TVs with a committee hearing going on and it didn't look like many people in the audience. After hearing a few minutes of this committee I went to my friend who worked for a state rep. and asked "can you find out what bills they are talking about?". She switched around the channels and found the hearing and found which committee was being broadcast on that channel and what bills they were hearing (or something like that) and then I researched the bills from there.
Dec 12, '05
This is bizarre-I just heard a report on "Oregon Considered" that rated the Oregon legislature's committee system as the most empowered in the nation.
Do we really function under pure closed rule? No floor amendments at all?
Second interesting comment in the story that comes under the heading of I told you so: the report finds that Oregon relies more heavily on its staff than any other, because we also rely on a part time, relatively amateur legislators. As I've noted here in the past, the ideal of the citizen legislator has broad appeal, but the reality is that if you disempower legislators via term limits, part time sessions, and low pay, you only end up empowering the executive branch, legislative staff, and lobbyists.
10:02 p.m.
Dec 12, '05
Didn't think it was a problem? For God's sake, Brown lives on the COAST.
It's like there's a majority of two-year-olds in the Oregon House, not Republicans. "No, it's not!" "But Representative, I have this non-partisan report that says-" "No, it's not! Bpfpfppfpt! I can't hear you!"
11:56 a.m.
Dec 13, '05
bless my state Rep! Keep up the focus, Mr. Macpherson!