The latest

Last month, 1000 Friends of Oregon welcomed Meriel Darzen to our board of directors and thanked outgoing board member Christine Rontal for her outstanding service.

An unprecedented session with the longest walkout in Oregon history, the 2023 legislative session started out big, stalled out for six weeks, and then ended with a flurry of bills passing, often in thematic packages, as work whittled down to the last hours before Sine Die. 1000 Friends still helped pass many good bills, especially in the housing realm, plus we stopped a big last-minute attempt to undermine our UGB system.

Oregon has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage federal infrastructure funding to envision and deliver an I-5 bridge replacement project that reflects the community’s priorities ­–but that opportunity is in jeopardy. Any chance for funding this session now relies on its inclusion in a broader budget bill. But with the walkout of some senators, this path is uncertain at best.

With the gridlock in Salem caused by the walkout of some senators, we risk losing broadly supported, incentive-based bills that use limited federal funding to help Oregon’s farmers, ranchers, and forestland managers be more resilient to drought and climate change. Together, this group of bills would establish voluntary programs for willing managers of working lands in Oregon.

Our state now has more than two dozen new land use leaders who will take the tenets of a strong, protective land use program and apply them in their diverse fields of work. These Oregonians join a network of LULIs across the state who better understand how the land use planning program impacts issues they care about.

1000 Friends calls on USDOT to measure and track greenhouse gas emissions from transportation investments.

1000 Friends, in partnership with Friends of Yamhill County, recently won a case that prevents misuse of the home occupation statute to build hotels on Yamhill County farmland. The ruling, at the Oregon Court of Appeals, is important to safeguarding our farmland across the state, where our land use system consistently protects our farms from being picked apart, and their land diverted for unintended, non-farm activities.

Now that we’re midway through the 2023 legislative session, we have dozens of bills to review that relate to housing, natural and working lands, transportation, climate, wildfires, threats to urban growth boundaries, semiconductors, budgets, and rulemaking. This is an update to our original 2023 legislative overview.

Our state is poised for success, with at least eight semiconductor applications already in motion — on land already designated for industrial use — to bring federal funding and more high quality jobs to our state. However, SB 4 includes a potential trap that Oregon must be vigilant in avoiding if we are to declare success: unprecedented authority given to the governor regarding land.

Since the introduction of House Bill 2659 earlier this session, 1000 Friends has been working in coalition with other groups to stop this bad bill – an attempt to effectively repeal the Climate Friendly & Equitable Communities program. Now we're seeing signs of lack of enthusiasm for it. Read more about its status.