The Tualatin City Council held a work session on April 27, 2026, covering a legislative session recap by the city's lobbying firm Thorn Run Partners, a discussion on food cart pod regulations, a city manager's report, and council round table. The council directed staff to move forward with a market-driven approach to food cart pods and received updates on state and federal advocacy efforts.
Recording in progress. Hey, good afternoon and welcome to the April 27, 2026 Walton City Council work session. Our first item on the agenda tonight is a 2026 state legislative session recap and for all update led by Megan George and the team from Thorn Run. Welcome, Megan. Hello, Mayor, members of the city council. I am Megan. I'm the deputy city manager in Towalton. And I'm gonna be up here for maybe 45 seconds before I yield the floor to our team from Thorn Run. But just to kick us off, we have now been under contract with Thorn Run for a couple of years and made it through our first long session with the team. Our short session, excuse me. We already did the long session, but they they do seem to smear together. So we've gone through the full legislative cycle in Oregon. So they are here to present the update from that short session, which concluded in early March. And then we have our federal lobbyist Greg in Zoom land, and he is going to give an update on our work on our federal agenda. I'll pop up back at the end to talk about next steps as we think about 2027, which it is not too early. In fact, we are ready to get going. So with that, I'll introduce Leah and Tyler. Welcome. Good to see you both. Thank you for having us here tonight. Good evening, Council uh Mayor, Council President. Um I'm Tyler Jansen. I'm senior vice president with Thornrun Partners. Um it is an honor to represent you in the halls of Salem. Um I'll let my colleague introduce herself. Hi everyone, Leah Navarro with Thornrun Partners, also vice president, and I work really closely with Tyler. Um so I we were here about a year ago and I was uh uh relaying with Megan right before this meeting. I think at that time you had a table of snacks laid out in the corner, and we were wondering uh whether or not uh the ethics commission was gonna let us continue to offer those snacks. Um that issue has been put to bed, you're allowed to serve snacks. Um, and so it's it actually is a meaningful win that it's important to celebrate when we get those. Um I'm going to, and is this our slide advancer right here? Yeah. Yeah. So we have federal up here first. Um why don't we jump ahead and we'll do state and we'll give uh our colleague Greg plenty of time to jump back and do the federal. Um for uh the uh as Megan mentioned, um this is our first short session representing you all. The short sessions have an entirely different feel than the long sessions do. Oregon runs on a two-year cycle. The long sessions are every odd year and they last for six months. The short sessions uh when they instituted them around 2010 on an annual basis. The short sessions were designed to be about policy tweaks and budget adjustments. Um it is like sprinting uh a marathon because it really does feel like you're compressing six months of work into a 35-day session. And so um for any sort of local government that deals with the plethora of things that you all have to deal with, uh short sessions really are about defense. And so to not bury the lead, I do want to say congratulations on um defending your seismic reservoir allocation from 2025 in a cuts budget, which is the budget that we experience this year and which we will be in at the state level through at least 2029, and it's going to get worse. Um any sort of preventing of a cut on a program or an allocation that matters to you is a huge win to sort of recap what that uh advocacy looked like when um the budget forecast came out at the end of the 2025 session, um, which essentially said that largely as a result of of federal decisions through HR 1, um the state's Medicare budget in particular was going to take a severe hit. Um the governor directed her agencies to start looking at any sort of programs that might be available for a cut. And the budget co-chairs in Salem, of which there are two, um, also directed their agencies to start preparing cuts lists. So in December of 2025, right before we went into a session, uh the director of the water resources department went before a subcommittee of uh the Ways and Means uh Committee and laid out a number of proposed cuts, including a cut to your seismic reservoir project. So it became very apparent that the number one priority is protecting what you have. Um I want to give a shout out, and if you have the ability to, please please thank uh Representative Walters, um Senate President Rob Wagner.