The 2011 version of the Oregon legislature has closed to rave reviews.  All of the major news outlets and commentators have congratulated the Governor and legislative leadership for their cooperation, willingness to compromise and progress on many important issues.  Oregon, we are told, is once more leading the way by demonstrating that, even in tough economic times, representative democracy can work and government can solve problems.  So how did we get here?  Masterfully.

When the legislative session opened, the general understanding among lobbyists was that the budget process would be a bloodbath and that very few bills would pass.  On the budget side, fiscal projections had us in a $5 billion hole.  As for bills, the House of Representatives was evenly split between Republicans and Democrats who would therefore have to agree for any bill to pass.  Given the partisan resentments of past years, few thought that cooperation would be forthcoming.  But it was.  Here are some possible reasons.

1.  Lowered expectations:  The legislature always engages in the psychological tactic of getting people ready for something awful and then delivering, to everyone's relief, something that is merely bad.  Even in the richest of years, we are always told that there is not any money.  This, of course, was not one of those years.

2.  Unsustainability:  Most policy makers realize that our aging demographics have made the structure and financing of government services unworkable for the next twenty years or so.  

3.  Willingness to innovate:  When cuts in services are inevitable, it encourages new ways to doing things.  For example, a person may insist that having a cappuccino every day is essential until the money to pay for it must come out of his beer budget.

4.  Forging new commonality:  Many have observed that all three legislative leaders come from rural Oregon and share a small town willingness to get along.  Whatever the merits of this suggestion, the urban/rural divide is as traditional in politics as the liberal/conservative one.

5.  Taxes off the table:  Ballot measures that increased tax rates for businesses and the more wealthy were behind this legislature.  This assured that tax reform would not be on the agenda, creating opportunities for discord.  With only so much money, even big campaign contributors could be told that their interests would have to wait.  Most would understand that Grandma should not be thrown under the bus to maintain the status quo.

6.  Shared reasons to gamble:  Despite all the highly charged national rhetoric on health care reform, it's well understood that the driver of reform is cost.  The balanced budget passed by the legislature is gambling that publicly-funded heath care costs can be dramatically lowered in the years ahead.  Most folks can agree to this because it delays big cuts throughout the budget and the reform strategy is to bring down high-expense care by keeping people healthier, rather than throwing them off insurance.  To go back to the beer analogy, this approach has something for both sides:  tastes great (healthy), less filling (costly).  

At the end of the session, legislators were willing to hold hands and jump off the cliff.  They began a number of reforms that will have to be implemented and tested.  Business as usual was not a winning formula.  Doing this required veteran leadership and, fortunately, it was there.  Oregon has chosen not to go down the road of Wisconsin or Minnesota which have opted for confrontation rather than innovation.  

We are nowhere near being out of the economic woods, and more needs to be done to correct some misguided policy directions, but Oregonians should be proud of what their government accomplished in this legislative session.