January 16, 2026
Another strongly recommended read, just out: The new legislative review - review of individual Portland-area legislators - by Willamette Week.
We've long found them a useful thumbnail guide, whether ultimately in agreement (usually) or not. It's not an end to evaluation, but a good place to begin.
Praise be to Seattle's Stranger for doing something more media organizations ought to do a lot more often - checking out the weekly religious services, finding out what is said and evaluating their impacts.
In their piece "A Month of Sundays," the paper sent 30 reporters into 30 churches, and then reported - well, mostly commented - on what they found: "We packed a month's worth of worship into a single day so that we could report back to you, our readers, about just what the Seventh-day Adventists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Catholics, and the Jesus freaks at Mars Hill are up to. We also snuck into a mosque, a synagogue, and Sea-Tac's meditation room. We took a look inside their sanctuaries, we took in their sermons, we took Communion, and we took notes."
After which, the Slog said, "all hell broke loose." You can tell why: There wasn't much reverence in the descriptions, to say the least; they were done in Stranger style.
Nonetheless, with cautionary note attached, highly recommended reading.
Alan Bates |
Ben Westlund |
Could be that no piece of legislation passed in any Northwest legislature in this decade turns out to be as important as Oregon's Senate Bill 329. If it is passed and does what it sets out to do, it could transform the provision of health care in Oregon and could make the state a national model for starting the mending of a thoroughly broken system. It sounds ambitious and it is - it is breathtaking.
The immediate point here is that, while certainly no done deal, odds on its passage now appear favorable. Having just (Tuesday) cleared subcommittee action, it has won a hard-to-get spot in the Friday meeting of the Joint Ways and Means Committee (a development suggesting significant legislative push) and if passed there, goes directly to both House and Senate floors. We've heard (some days back) one senator say the bill looks likely to pass; the mood depicted to us today by one well-informed Senate staffer could be described as apprehensively optimistic.
As significantly, Governor Ted Kulongoski was today publicly talking through the second, third and fourth steps for dealing with what comes next out of this bill, something we suspect he would decline to do if the bill were in the problematic category.
If all this materializes, the impact of this legislative session on environmental, education and consumer matters may be dwarfed by the eventual effect of this bill. This bill, with its associated actions and followup measures, fairly could be fairly described as large-scale health care reform.
Such ambition would be more questionable in other arenas. This bill, whose principal backers are Senators Ben Westlund, D-Tumalo, and Alan Bates, D-Ashland, is so large-scale, so sweeping in its effect, that one of the core certainties about it is that there will be unintended consequences, and probably not a few of them. But what it would uproot is so core-rotten that the odds of significant improvement are likely.
Let's draw back a bit to take a look at this - of all governmental policy activities this year, this one may be most worth it.