Oregon lawmakers are set to meet from Feb. 2 to no later than March 8 for their every-other-year “short session,” and this one is expected to be challenging.
Oregon faces a potential budget shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to changes Congress made last year to the federal tax code. That’s in part because Oregon income tax filers begin their tax calculations using the federal definition of taxable income (which is your income after federal tax exemptions and deductions). To reduce the budget impact of tax changes passed by Congressional Republicans in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Oregon’s Democratic majority will be looking to disconnect from the federal tax code in some way. A bill to do just that passed the Oregon House last year, but died in the Oregon Senate.
On top of that, a 6-cent gas tax increase that was meant to shore up funding for road and highway maintenance was put on ice Jan. 1 after opponents gathered enough signatures to refer it to the November 2026 ballot. To avoid that delay or possible rejection by voters, lawmakers may decide to repeal the measure that they passed in a September 2025 special session and replace that with some other measure to fund transportation. If they fail to find adequate revenue, the Oregon Department of Transportation is likely to cancel pending highway projects and lay off staff as soon as March or even earlier.
Unions, and especially public employee unions, will be in Salem to push for both of those revenue solutions, starting with a mass rally outside the capitol at noon on Wednesday, Feb. 5.
SEIU Local 503, Oregon’s largest public sector union, will also ask legislators to pass a modified version of a bill it proposed last year to establish a board to set minimum standards for long-term care workers.
Local 503 is also a big defender of the Oregon Health Plan, the Medicaid-funded health insurance program for low-income Oregonians. State lawmakers will have to decide whether and how to respond to changes made by the Republican Congress, including work requirements for some recipients and penalties for states like Oregon that made immigrants eligible for health benefits. The union will be pushing the legislature to preserve benefits as much as possible. The same goes for food stamp benefits in the program known as SNAP; those recipients will also face new work requirements, which are likely to prove time-consuming and costly for the state to implement.
UFCW Local 555, Oregon’s biggest private sector union, is going to the legislature to back several bills to rescue Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay. Local 555 represents workers at the publicly owned hospital, which has come under significant financial stress in recent years. One proposal would be for the state to make a loan to the hospital so it can retire a high-interest private bank loan.
The Oregon AFL-CIO, the state’s federation of unions, will support bills backed by its affiliates. It will also prioritize passage of bills to support immigrant workers, including a proposal to make evidence of immigration status inadmissible as an employer defense in wage theft cases and a proposal to bar employers from retaliating against workers for updating their work authorization documents.
