Dispute over Lottery Funds

House Democrats want the Legislature to be able to dip into funds dedicated for conservation

By Saul Hubbard

The Register-Guard

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SALEM — A simmering disagreement over how much state-run and nonprofit environmental conservation agencies are entitled to from the 15 percent of the lottery fund money granted to them by Measure 76 — which almost 70 percent of Oregon voters approved last November — is threatening to have much wider consequences.

The argument has derailed an effort by House Democratic representatives to draft significant changes to Measure 76, changes that they had hoped to get on the ballot for public approval this May.

House Democratic Leader Dave Hunt of Gladstone, Rep. Jules Bailey, D-Portland, and Rep. Ben Cannon, D-Portland, introduced House Joint Resolution 29 amending Measure 76 to ease their concerns that the measure might allow funding to parks, streams and other natural areas to stay steady and even swell in times of economic crisis when other state spending was being slashed. They want state government to be able to dip into the parks-and-recreation set-aside if state government is plunged into the throes of economic hardship.

For their part, some conservation groups see the House move as a bid to pull some conservation money away from the control of nonprofit groups.

The pot of revenue at stake is big: about $87 million a year.

Some of the changes the resolution proposes are:

Increasing the share that state government conservation agencies would get to 42 percent from 35 percent of lottery fund revenue that Measure 76 dedicated to conservation, thereby freeing up around $8.5 million in the hard-pressed general fund, the main pool of money that pays for most state programs.

Setting up a safety valve that would allow the Legislature to tap into the lottery-funded conservation money in times of economic hardship.

Establishing a cap on how much the total funding nature conservation agencies received under Measure 76.

Creating a 2035 sunset for Measure 76.

The resolution’s sponsors had hoped to fast-track it based on a written agreement they signed last summer with three major private not-for-profit nature conservancy groups that financially supported the campaign for Measure 76: the Nature Conservancy, the Trust for Public Land and the Oregon League of Conservation Voters.

The agreement grants Hunt’s, Bailey’s and Cannon’s support for Measure 76 in exchange for the private conservation groups’ backing on the specific changes to the measure proposed by House Joint Resolution 29 before it was referred to voters.

Yet, in the resolution’s first public hearing Tuesday, the Nature Conservancy’s director of government relations Nan Evans raised objections about the content of the resolution, saying it had strayed from the agreement that her organization had signed up to.

“We did not intend to agree to a change in the percentages between the grants to the state agencies,” she testified. “In retrospect, the discussions and language of the agreement were not clear enough.”

Evans also testified that the legislators should have included a broader representation of the affected parties — conservation groups — in last summer’s negotiations, something other conservancy groups testifying agreed with.

“We ask the committee to daylight this process and broaden the opportunity for many more conservation organizations to participate,” said Tom O’Brien of the Network for Watershed Councils.

However, the two other conservancy groups that signed last summer’s agreement did not share Evans’ fresh objections.

“We support the resolution,” said Stephen Kafoury, lobbyist for Trust for Public Lands. “At the end of the day, we are pragmatic about helping to make something happen.”

After hearing Tuesday’s testimony, Rep. Vic Gilliam, R-Molalla, co-chairman of the House Committee on Energy, Environment and Water, tabled further discussions of the resolution saying that with the issues at stake being so complicated, he wished to take a longer look at the bill.

Jon Isaacs, executive director of the Oregon League of Conservative Voters, said his organization is supporting the resolution as is.

“From our point of view, it is consistent with the agreement we all signed,” he said.

Bailey defended the agreement he helped work out last summer with the three groups, stating that the legislators were operating under the impression that the Nature Conservancy was also representing smaller groups, something Evans testified Tuesday had never been the case.

“We must have a difference in memory,” Bailey said.

Bailey and Cannon said the agreement was the primary reason there was no funded opposition to Measure 76 from education and health organizations and that its November passage went so smoothly.

Isaacs, of the Oregon League of Conservative Voters, agreed.

“There’s no question part of the reason we came up with this agreement was so there would be no well-funded opposition to Measure 76.”

Last fall, some education and health organizations privately expressed misgivings about Measure 76, fearing that it would reserve for conservation purposes a significant slice of lottery fund revenue regardless of how dire the state government’s finances became.

Bailey and Cannon also pointed to a number of newspaper opinion pieces published in the weeks leading up to the November vote that all endorsed the measure, but only with the caveat that an agreement to tweak it at the next opportunity had been made with nature conservation agencies.

Cannon said he wants to change the split of the lottery fund conservation allocation so that state government agencies get a bit more than under Measure 76, because without that change, there may be cuts in nature programs run by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Agriculture.

“I hope we can work in good faith and that the signatories of the agreement will step up and do their part,” he said. “But the more time goes by, the more it will be difficult to get the parties involved to stick to it.”