This content was published: June 3, 2011. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Blog: The chaos of the closing days
Photos and Story by Dana Haynes
We are on the “one-hour notice” rule in Salem.
Which means that the minimum notice that any committee needs to give, before hearing a bill or a budget, is 60 minutes.
For full-time lobbyists, that means hanging around the café in the basement of the Legislature, or in the lobbyists’ cubbyhole of a space, deep in the bowels of the building.
For part-time lobbyists, like me, it means returning to Portland, or where ever, to do your job, and hope like heck that your cell phone doesn’t ring. If it does, it’s likely someone saying, “You have 55 minutes to get to Hearing Room B. Oh, and be prepared to testify on (fill in the blank).”
In order to get through the last, cranky days of a session, it also is not unusual for the Legislature to go to a schedule of evening hearings and weekend hearings. So that phone call might not come to my office; it could come at home.
We are expecting the Community College Support Fund to go to the full Ways & Means Committee (the Legislature’s budget-writing body) next week, then on to the floor of both the House and Senate.
We’re on the home stretch of a sprinted marathon.
About Dana Haynes
Dana Haynes, joined PCC in 2007 as the manager of the Office of Public Affairs, directing the college's media and government relations. Haynes spent the previous 20 years as a reporter, columnist and editor for Oregon newspapers, including ... more »