Caesar, the No Drama Llama, was a popular attraction at the Democratic Party election night watch at Willamette Heritage Center in Salem. (Ron Cooper/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Editor’s note: The Capital Chronicle has launched a $10,000 end-of-year fundraising campaign to help us continue our first-class coverage next year. A lot is at stake, and there’s a long legislative session in 2025. We’re completely dependent on donor dollars, which are tax deductible. Please contribute to us if you can.
From a historic election to record wildfires to drug recriminalization, 2024 was a big year for state government and political news in Oregon.
Here’s a roundup of the most notable stories and trends the Capital Chronicle covered this year.
Republicans won the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and the presidency, but they did poorly in Oregon. U.S. Rep Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Oregon, lost her reelection bid to Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum, giving Democrats five of the state’s six U.S. House seats. Republicans also lost ground in the state Legislature: Democrats will hold 18 of 30 Senate seats and 36 of 60 House seats in 2025 after winning a Bend-based Senate district and Woodburn-based House district held by Republicans. And Democrats Tobias Read, Dan Rayfield and Elizabeth Steiner swept statewide races for secretary of state, attorney general and treasurer.
Democrats including legislative leaders and Gov. Tina Kotek, who was not up for election this year, view the election results as proof that Oregonians support their policies. Kotek’s proposed budget for the next two years doubles down on spending for housing, homelessness and mental health.
Oregon lawmakers, alarmed by the state’s crisis of fentanyl addiction and fatal overdoses, made major changes to the state’s drug policy. The Legislature, through House Bill 4002, recriminalized low-level drug possession and allowed counties to start new programs that allow police to steer drug users into treatment instead of jail.
So far, 28 of Oregon’s 36 counties have started or plan to start deflection programs. From rural, conservative counties to blue Portland, the law allows local officials the flexibility to set up deflection programs as they see fit, including determining who is eligible. Local officials say they are starting small and urged the public to give them time for the programs to succeed. As the 2025 legislative session starts, counties will seek more funding, saying it’s needed for long-term results.
More than 200 Oregonians have started the program.
The year in environmental reporting started and ended with the same question: Who will pay for the state’s longer, more intense, more expensive wildfires? For now, the answer is Oregon taxpayers. Meanwhile, getting insurance in the state is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive due to the threat of wildfires, which burned a record of nearly 2 million acres in 2024, mostly in central and eastern Oregon shrub and grasslands.
The hotter, drier, windier conditions fueling fires are due in large part to climate change, an issue state officials will be able to tackle more aggressively in the next year by reinstating the Climate Protection Program after it was derailed by a lawsuit brought by gas companies.
On the eve of the 2024 legislative session, the Oregon Supreme Court unanimously rejected arguments from Republican senators that they should be allowed to run for reelection despite missing nearly six weeks of floor sessions during a 2023 quorum-denying walkout. Voters frustrated with the increasing use of walkouts approved a constitutional amendment in 2022 to punish any lawmakers with 10 or more unexcused absences by barring them from reelection, and 10 Republican senators responded with the longest walkout in state history to protest bills on abortion, gender-affirming care and guns.
Six of the senators — Brian Boquist of Dallas, Lynn Findley of Vale, Bill Hansell of Athena, Tim Knopp of Bend, Dennis Linthicum of Klamath Falls and Art Robinson of Cave Junction — will leave the Legislature, at least temporarily, in January. Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham of The Dalles and Sens. Cedric Hayden of Fall Creek, Kim Thatcher of Keizer and Suzanne Weber of Tillamook have two years left on their terms before they’re barred from running for reelection.
It was a good year for trees in Oregon’s state forests, more of which will be spared from intensive logging. The Elliott State Research Forest is being entered into a carbon market under an agreement to reduce logging, which should allow the forest to capture and store more carbon dioxide, in exchange for millions of dollars in carbon credits. The Capital Chronicle published a deep dive into the growing interest in Oregon forests for carbon markets and some of the challenges and opportunities they present.
Another win for forests and the animal species that depend on them was a long-awaited habitat conservation plan for Western state forests, which will reduce logging by 30% on average across 630,000 acres of state forests in the next 70 years. One tiny school district in the heart of the Clatsop State Forest, however, sued the state, alleging the plan would cut into its budget, which is funded entirely with timber revenue from logging on state forests.
In March, Kotek’s chief of staff abruptly left her office and two other top employees quit or took leave. Public records released by the governor’s office a month later confirmed that Kotek’s top staff were concerned about the growing role of Aimee Kotek Wilson, Kotek’s wife, in influencing policy and acting as a public face for the governor.
Kotek announced plans to hire an aide for Kotek Wilson and create an official “Office of the First Spouse,” then abandoned those plans after weeks of pushback. The Oregon Ethics Commission deadlocked on whether to investigate ethics complaints against Kotek and later advised Kotek that nothing in state law prohibits Kotek Wilson from acting as a volunteer, as long as she doesn’t use that role for personal financial gain.
It was a record funding year for Oregon’s 197 public school districts, where students are still trying to catch up in core subjects since the COVID pandemic. Schools got to work implementing new reading and writing programs to boost literacy rates among elementary students, while cell phones were phased out in many schools and the Oregon Department of Education directed districts to do something to get them away from students during class.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek wants another year of record education funding for 2026-2028, including money to cover more than half-a-billion dollars in increased contributions required from schools to the state’s public pension program, which is struggling with insolvency in the face of historic policy challenges and underperforming investments in recent years.
Former House Speaker Dan Rayfield often referred to his efforts to pass campaign contribution limits as tilting at windmills — but that quixotic quest succeeded, to widespread surprise, this year. The threat of a ballot measure spurred a rush of negotiations among labor unions, the business lobby, good government groups and lawmakers during the five-week legislative session.
The final deal,which was passed on wide bipartisan margins and signed by Kotek, takes effect on Jan. 1, 2027. Individuals and corporations will be limited to giving a candidate no more than $3,300 per election, or $6,600 for a candidate who appears in both the primary and general elections while small political committees that accept up to $250 per year from individuals will be able to give up to $10 per donor per election to statewide candidates and $5 per donor per election for other candidates. Unions and other membership organizations will be allowed to give $26,400 per election to a statewide candidate and $13,200 per election to non-statewide candidates.
But that didn’t stop the flow of money this year, with Oregon’s richest man offering gifts for Republicans. While lawmakers debated campaign finance limits, Nike cofounder Phil Knight wrote a $2 million check to a political action committee that tries to elect Republicans to the statehouse.
The Oregon Department of Human Services settled a five-year-old class-action lawsuit, promising to make reforms to its system that cares for 4,500 children in the state’s foster care system.
The 2019 lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, alleged the department, agency director Fariborz Pakseresht and the child welfare system failed foster children as they bounced among foster homes, were put up in hotels to home and failed to receive appropriate services. The case, which started the accounts of 10 foster children, gained class-action status in 2022.
Under the agreement, the state agency will work on improvements for years with an outside expert and two groups that represented the children in court: Disability Rights Oregon and A Better Childhood, a national nonprofit advocacy group.
The Oregon Department of Corrections faced a cloud of scrutiny in 2024 for its care of inmates.
In February, an outside accrediting organization found Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon’s only women’s prison, had a backlog of hundreds of medical appointments and months to wait for imaging work. The agency said it would make improvements to its care.
But questions persist for the agency that is responsible for 12,000 inmates in a dozen facilities across the state. Two top medical officials in the agency went on administrative leave in December amid an investigation, and officials said an outside expert would investigate management of the agency’s health care system.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
by Julia Shumway, Alex Baumhardt and Ben Botkin, Oregon Capital Chronicle
December 31, 2024
by Julia Shumway, Alex Baumhardt and Ben Botkin, Oregon Capital Chronicle
December 31, 2024
Editor’s note: The Capital Chronicle has launched a $10,000 end-of-year fundraising campaign to help us continue our first-class coverage next year. A lot is at stake, and there’s a long legislative session in 2025. We’re completely dependent on donor dollars, which are tax deductible. Please contribute to us if you can.
From a historic election to record wildfires to drug recriminalization, 2024 was a big year for state government and political news in Oregon.
Here’s a roundup of the most notable stories and trends the Capital Chronicle covered this year.
Republicans won the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and the presidency, but they did poorly in Oregon. U.S. Rep Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Oregon, lost her reelection bid to Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum, giving Democrats five of the state’s six U.S. House seats. Republicans also lost ground in the state Legislature: Democrats will hold 18 of 30 Senate seats and 36 of 60 House seats in 2025 after winning a Bend-based Senate district and Woodburn-based House district held by Republicans. And Democrats Tobias Read, Dan Rayfield and Elizabeth Steiner swept statewide races for secretary of state, attorney general and treasurer.
Democrats including legislative leaders and Gov. Tina Kotek, who was not up for election this year, view the election results as proof that Oregonians support their policies. Kotek’s proposed budget for the next two years doubles down on spending for housing, homelessness and mental health.
Oregon lawmakers, alarmed by the state’s crisis of fentanyl addiction and fatal overdoses, made major changes to the state’s drug policy. The Legislature, through House Bill 4002, recriminalized low-level drug possession and allowed counties to start new programs that allow police to steer drug users into treatment instead of jail.
So far, 28 of Oregon’s 36 counties have started or plan to start deflection programs. From rural, conservative counties to blue Portland, the law allows local officials the flexibility to set up deflection programs as they see fit, including determining who is eligible. Local officials say they are starting small and urged the public to give them time for the programs to succeed. As the 2025 legislative session starts, counties will seek more funding, saying it’s needed for long-term results.
More than 200 Oregonians have started the program.
The year in environmental reporting started and ended with the same question: Who will pay for the state’s longer, more intense, more expensive wildfires? For now, the answer is Oregon taxpayers. Meanwhile, getting insurance in the state is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive due to the threat of wildfires, which burned a record of nearly 2 million acres in 2024, mostly in central and eastern Oregon shrub and grasslands.
The hotter, drier, windier conditions fueling fires are due in large part to climate change, an issue state officials will be able to tackle more aggressively in the next year by reinstating the Climate Protection Program after it was derailed by a lawsuit brought by gas companies.
On the eve of the 2024 legislative session, the Oregon Supreme Court unanimously rejected arguments from Republican senators that they should be allowed to run for reelection despite missing nearly six weeks of floor sessions during a 2023 quorum-denying walkout. Voters frustrated with the increasing use of walkouts approved a constitutional amendment in 2022 to punish any lawmakers with 10 or more unexcused absences by barring them from reelection, and 10 Republican senators responded with the longest walkout in state history to protest bills on abortion, gender-affirming care and guns.
Six of the senators — Brian Boquist of Dallas, Lynn Findley of Vale, Bill Hansell of Athena, Tim Knopp of Bend, Dennis Linthicum of Klamath Falls and Art Robinson of Cave Junction — will leave the Legislature, at least temporarily, in January. Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham of The Dalles and Sens. Cedric Hayden of Fall Creek, Kim Thatcher of Keizer and Suzanne Weber of Tillamook have two years left on their terms before they’re barred from running for reelection.
It was a good year for trees in Oregon’s state forests, more of which will be spared from intensive logging. The Elliott State Research Forest is being entered into a carbon market under an agreement to reduce logging, which should allow the forest to capture and store more carbon dioxide, in exchange for millions of dollars in carbon credits. The Capital Chronicle published a deep dive into the growing interest in Oregon forests for carbon markets and some of the challenges and opportunities they present.
Another win for forests and the animal species that depend on them was a long-awaited habitat conservation plan for Western state forests, which will reduce logging by 30% on average across 630,000 acres of state forests in the next 70 years. One tiny school district in the heart of the Clatsop State Forest, however, sued the state, alleging the plan would cut into its budget, which is funded entirely with timber revenue from logging on state forests.
In March, Kotek’s chief of staff abruptly left her office and two other top employees quit or took leave. Public records released by the governor’s office a month later confirmed that Kotek’s top staff were concerned about the growing role of Aimee Kotek Wilson, Kotek’s wife, in influencing policy and acting as a public face for the governor.
Kotek announced plans to hire an aide for Kotek Wilson and create an official “Office of the First Spouse,” then abandoned those plans after weeks of pushback. The Oregon Ethics Commission deadlocked on whether to investigate ethics complaints against Kotek and later advised Kotek that nothing in state law prohibits Kotek Wilson from acting as a volunteer, as long as she doesn’t use that role for personal financial gain.
It was a record funding year for Oregon’s 197 public school districts, where students are still trying to catch up in core subjects since the COVID pandemic. Schools got to work implementing new reading and writing programs to boost literacy rates among elementary students, while cell phones were phased out in many schools and the Oregon Department of Education directed districts to do something to get them away from students during class.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek wants another year of record education funding for 2026-2028, including money to cover more than half-a-billion dollars in increased contributions required from schools to the state’s public pension program, which is struggling with insolvency in the face of historic policy challenges and underperforming investments in recent years.
Former House Speaker Dan Rayfield often referred to his efforts to pass campaign contribution limits as tilting at windmills — but that quixotic quest succeeded, to widespread surprise, this year. The threat of a ballot measure spurred a rush of negotiations among labor unions, the business lobby, good government groups and lawmakers during the five-week legislative session.
The final deal,which was passed on wide bipartisan margins and signed by Kotek, takes effect on Jan. 1, 2027. Individuals and corporations will be limited to giving a candidate no more than $3,300 per election, or $6,600 for a candidate who appears in both the primary and general elections while small political committees that accept up to $250 per year from individuals will be able to give up to $10 per donor per election to statewide candidates and $5 per donor per election for other candidates. Unions and other membership organizations will be allowed to give $26,400 per election to a statewide candidate and $13,200 per election to non-statewide candidates.
But that didn’t stop the flow of money this year, with Oregon’s richest man offering gifts for Republicans. While lawmakers debated campaign finance limits, Nike cofounder Phil Knight wrote a $2 million check to a political action committee that tries to elect Republicans to the statehouse.
The Oregon Department of Human Services settled a five-year-old class-action lawsuit, promising to make reforms to its system that cares for 4,500 children in the state’s foster care system.
The 2019 lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, alleged the department, agency director Fariborz Pakseresht and the child welfare system failed foster children as they bounced among foster homes, were put up in hotels to home and failed to receive appropriate services. The case, which started the accounts of 10 foster children, gained class-action status in 2022.
Under the agreement, the state agency will work on improvements for years with an outside expert and two groups that represented the children in court: Disability Rights Oregon and A Better Childhood, a national nonprofit advocacy group.
The Oregon Department of Corrections faced a cloud of scrutiny in 2024 for its care of inmates.
In February, an outside accrediting organization found Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon’s only women’s prison, had a backlog of hundreds of medical appointments and months to wait for imaging work. The agency said it would make improvements to its care.
But questions persist for the agency that is responsible for 12,000 inmates in a dozen facilities across the state. Two top medical officials in the agency went on administrative leave in December amid an investigation, and officials said an outside expert would investigate management of the agency’s health care system.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.
Julia Shumway is the Capital Chronicle’s deputy editor and lead political reporter. Before joining the Capital Chronicle in 2021, she was a legislative reporter for the Arizona Capitol Times in Phoenix and reported on local and state government and politics in Iowa, Nebraska and Bend. An award-winning journalist, Julia also serves as president of the Oregon Legislative Correspondents Association, or Capitol press corps.
Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Alex Baumhardt covers education and the environment for the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Before coming to Oregon, she was a national radio producer and reporter covering education for American Public Media’s documentaries and investigations unit, APM Reports. She earned a master’s degree in digital and visual media as a U.S. Fulbright scholar in Spain, and has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post.
Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Ben Botkin covers justice, health and social services issues for the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Ben Botkin has been a reporter since 2003, when he drove from his Midwest locale to Idaho for his first journalism job. He has written extensively about politics and state agencies in Idaho, Nevada and Oregon. Most recently, he covered health care and the Oregon Legislature for The Lund Report. Botkin has won multiple journalism awards for his investigative and enterprise reporting, including on education, state budgets and criminal justice.
Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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© Oregon Capital Chronicle, 2024
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Oregon Capital Chronicle focuses on deep and useful reporting on Oregon state government, politics and policy. We help readers understand how those in government are using their power, what’s happening to taxpayer dollars, and how citizens can stake a bigger role in big decisions.
We’re part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. (See full republishing guidelines.)
© Oregon Capital Chronicle, 2024
