Measure 57 key to ending the 2009 session
Issue keeps budgets of public-safety agencies in limbo
On the road to adjournment of any legislative session, roadblocks always emerge.
Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, encountered one June 10, when one Democrat declined to vote for a budget-balancing tax bill and blocked its approval by the required 60 percent majority.
But that roadblock disappeared in less than 24 hours.
House Speaker Dave Hunt, D-Gladstone, encountered one Friday, when he fell three votes short of the two-thirds majority required to approve lesser prison sentences under a ballot measure that voters passed in the fall.
Lawmakers will know Monday, when the bill can be reconsidered, if that roadblock has disappeared — or whether leaders will have to come up with a detour.
There are likely to be other roadblocks as leaders press to close the 2009 session. The target is June 30, but the talk is of sometime at the end of this week.
Many bills still are in the legislative pipeline, though not as many as last week, and many agency budgets have not yet emerged from committee, though many soon will.
But public-safety budgets will hinge on how the House resolves what to do about House Bill 3508, which failed on a 37-22 vote.
Not only does it phase in Measure 57, which lengthens sentences for repeat property and drug offenders, it proposes nearly a dozen other changes that generate savings from unneeded prison beds and smaller community-corrections caseloads.
A companion bill, which hinges on passage of House Bill 3508 or something similar, spends $60 million to restore programs that are proposed for cuts in prisons, the Oregon Youth Authority, Oregon State Police and other public-safety agencies.
David Rogers, executive director of the Partnership for Safety and Justice, expressed disappointment after Friday's vote.
"Oregon's approach to public safety just took a giant step in the wrong direction," said Rogers, whose group promotes alternatives to prisons and mandatory sentences. "HB 3508 was designed to not only protect significant parts of our public-safety system from serious budget cuts but also to institute reforms that made our system smarter and more cost-effective."
Untying the knot
Friday's vote did demonstrate a couple of things:
-Republicans still matter, even if they hold only 24 of the 60 seats in the House. Democrats can prevail on revenue-raising measures without Republicans, but they will need Republicans to suspend voter-approved criminal sentences. (Two Republicans voted for Friday's bill; one Democrat voted against.)
The Senate is likely to pass a measure with the necessary Republican support.
-District attorneys as a group have leverage. Their support made it possible for lawmakers last year to refer an alternative to a competing mandatory-prison ballot initiative sponsored by Salem lawyer and former legislator Kevin Mannix — it won and Mannix's Measure 61 lost.
"We've been adamant about wanting the will of the voters to be implemented," said Doug Harcleroad, a former Lane County district attorney who spoke for the Oregon Anticrime Alliance.
The Oregon District Attorneys Association, which has its own lobbyist, opposed Friday's bill, although some district attorneys said they were OK with it. Harcleroad, as a former DA, wasn't speaking on their behalf.
But neither Republicans, with some exceptions, nor district attorneys want to see negotiations collapse altogether given the alternative.
Hunt's spokesman, Geoff Sugerman, said after Friday's vote that the alternative is a series of cuts to public-safety agency budgets.
Agency impact
Oregon Youth Authority, for example, would lose 76 close-custody beds for young offenders at Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility in Salem and all 50 beds at the Eastern Oregon Youth Correctional Facility in Burns. A deal would give enough money to the agency to buy back 25 more beds in addition to keeping the others.
Ken Ross, who works at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn and spoke for Local 503 of Service Employees International Union, said the potential loss is comparable to what happened during the most recent budget crisis six years ago. Back then, the agency lost about 250 beds, more than a quarter of its total, and Ross said it has taken years to recover.
Ross said the consequences go beyond the closure of beds — the whole center in Burns, where the unemployment rate tops 20 percent — or loss of 90 full-time jobs.
"What that cut forces us to do is shove together all the kids we have left in a kind of 'offender soup' and mix offender types," Ross said. "For those who do not stay in the youth authority, they get sent upstate (into adult prisons) or kicked loose."
He said it is not wise to mix young offenders who require drug and alcohol treatment — Hillcrest has a special unit for them — with others who are detained for sex and violent crimes, or who require help for mental illness.
The budget restorations also are important to the Oregon State Police, whose proposed budget would retain the 100 troopers hired in the past two years to beef up highway patrols — but would lose detective and forensics-lab positions without the money to be added.
Harcleroad said he anticipated a lot of backstage discussions this weekend involving the official district attorneys' group and lawmakers.
"We are hopeful that the public-safety cuts on the list can be ameliorated or avoided," he said. "I'm not confident of that, but I am hopeful we might do something."
Not just Measure 57
The package of changes in House Bill 3508 go beyond phasing in the Measure 57 sentences, although tougher penalties would stand against those who commit fraud against older people, deliver illegal drugs to minors, or sell significant quantities of drugs. The other sentences would take effect Jan. 1, 2012.
Among the other changes are a maximum of 60 days in jail for felons who violate probation — the current limit of 180 days would continue to apply if offenders commit new crimes — lessened penalties for simple possession of some drugs if the offender has less than a gram and has no prior drug offenses, and the status of offenders on probation and post-prison supervision. Counties would not be paid for those on "inactive" status.
Partly offsetting those changes are increased penalties for third-degree assault connected with drunken driving, strangulation, and first-degree kidnapping with the intent of committing a sex crime against someone under age 12.
One change that angered Rep. Kim Thatcher, R-Keizer, is to increase "earned time" that an inmate can accumulate to reduce a sentence from 20 percent to 30 percent. There is a notice provision — including the victim — and a hearing if an early release is challenged by the district attorney or the courts.
About 4,500 inmates may be affected.
"Let's be real: Going to 30 percent 'good time' will soon become permanent — and we all know it," Thatcher said in the House on Friday. "Once you go there, it will be too hard to go back."
It prompted a rebuke by Rep. Jeff Barker, D-Aloha, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the legislative negotiators. He said the bill would let that provision expire on July 1, 2013.
Reason for release
At a budget committee meeting on the previous day, state Sen. Jackie Winters, R-Salem, said she would vote for the bill with that specific provision.
"I lived with an expert on the issues of whether you do early release of an individual, whether you require that individual to assume some responsibility for his or her behavior, and whether you provide some incentive within the prison system so that the individual can do better to get out," she said.
"For me, it was not a difficult choice. I've had a lot of conversations over 38 years with that expert, not from a standpoint of books or the educational system, but from someone who actually lived it."
Winters did not name him, but it was her late husband, Ted — who was sentenced to life in Oregon State Penitentiary in 1963 when he underwent his own personal transformation. Among the first inmates in a work-release program in 1967, he was working in the office of Gov. Tom McCall when he met Jackie McClain, then running a community center in Portland, and who later joined McCall's staff herself.
McCall pardoned Ted Winters one week before Christmas 1973, and the next year, named him state ombudsman, a position now called citizens' representative.
Friday was their 38th wedding anniversary. But for Sen. Winters, it was the first without Ted Winters, who died Aug. 26 at age 84.
By Peter Wong, Statesman Journal
pwong@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6745
