This work session covered two major presentations: a legislative update from the city's government relations firm, Thorn Run Partners, and the annual report from the Community Involvement Organizations (CIOs). The council also discussed its support for the upcoming Washington County Cooperative Library System levy and heard several staff and council announcements.
Megan Hello, Mayor, members of the council. I am Megan George, the deputy city manager in Towallaton, and I am here to introduce three members of our government relations team with Thorn Run. As you'll recall, about a year ago, a little over a year ago, we hired Thorn Run to represent Towallaton in both Salem and Washington, D.C. They are here to provide an update on their work at both of those locations. One of our big priorities for Tuallaton was to secure funding, and I'm pleased to share that we'll have an update on that. As you know, Cody and myself are the staff liaisons to our government relations team, so we work closely with them throughout the legislative session and throughout the year. So with that, I'll introduce Dan, Leah, and Tyler. Welcome. Good to see you all again. See you all. Thank you for uh having us here, Council. Um we'll go through and introduce ourselves and then I'll kick off our little presentation here. My name's Tyler Jansen. I'm a vice president with Thornrun Partners. My name is Leah Navarro with Thornrun Partners. And I'm Dan Bates. I'm a partner with Thornrun Partners. Well, thank you so much for hosting us here tonight. Um we're really pleased to be here with you and to share a little bit of an update of uh both our performance in 2025, and as I'm sure a lot of you are aware, uh a special session is just around the corner about transportation funding. Leah and I literally came from the Capitol here to be with you tonight, so we have some updates uh hot off the press. Um, but before we go there, I just want to start with a little bit of an overview of the 2025 session. So uh the major themes that we saw this year uh being the long legislative session that was six months long from January through June. Um we saw uh very much the same priorities that we have seen for uh ever since Governor Kotech took office. Uh we saw transportation, behavioral health, K-12, and wildfire funding really took uh top tier. Um while those were the top priorities, I do want to emphasize that this legislative session we saw more legislation introduced than we have ever seen before. So for a part-time legislature, uh we saw over 4,000 bills introduced. Um that led to, as you can imagine, uh a majority of those bills not being heard, certainly a vast majority of those bills not passing, and the ones that were granted time in committees maybe received less time than they would have if uh there had been fewer bills introduced. Um of the major themes from the 2025 session uh was that Oregon for a number of years now has enjoyed some really tremendous economic forecasts and revenue forecasts. This was the first session since 2011 where we saw uh the quarterly revenue uh estimate that comes out in May actually decrease from the quarterly revenue estimate that comes out in March. Um, as we are all grappling uh with understanding the implications of federal legislation that's rolling out, which uh my colleague Dan is going to speak to during the federal update portion. Um we really started to feel that at the state level this year. So uh for the first time uh since 2011, we felt a much more constrained budgetary environment. Um it felt more tense in the Capitol than it has in years past, simply around uh a finite pool of resources and uh legislators who had been around who may have been used to seeing their capital projects funded. Um there was there was disappointment at the end of this session for many of them to not bury the lead. Well, we will certainly get to the success that we had with our capital funding request. Um, but overall did want to paint that picture of the mood. Uh you are aware of some of the major legislation that uh came up this year. Certainly um one that received a lot of airtime and ended up passing was the uh strike pay bill, um which was Senate Bill 916. Um it was a topic of pretty fierce negotiation. Um at the end of the day, uh the bill did end up passing. Uh the waiting period uh was amended, uh, as was a cap on the amount of benefits that are um available to striking workers. Uh we do anticipate to see uh implementation of that bill watch very closely as well as um any employers watching for any unintended consequences as a result of that passage. Um critical importance to local governments. We saw uh pretty significant uh property tax study bill pass, um, which uh in its original form would have tasked the legislative revenue officer with doing a study and interviewing only legislators. Coalition of local governments was very successful in arguing that it probably makes more sense to talk to your cities and counties about revenue implications under measures 5 and 50. So we were able to see passage of a study bill that explicitly gives the association of Oregon Counties and the League of Oregon Cities seats at that table. We will certainly be very involved in making sure that they have information from Towallatin at their requests as well. Another final piece of major legislation affecting localities was seeing enshrined permanently some of the recreational immunity protections. You're all aware of city-county insurance services essentially issuing a decree that localities may wish to close their parks and recreation spaces after a slip and fall incident in Newport that sort of cast uh that recreational immunity protection into question. There was uh a good uh compromise bill this year between the local government side, uh the risk management side and the trial lawyer um side sort of coming together to enshrine some of the temporary protections that had passed in the last uh short session into this longer session fix.