House Dem flip flop narrowly halts GOP Measure 110 repeal bill

Rep. Paul Evans voted to bring GOP bill to floor minutes before casting the deciding "nay" vote on identical motion minutes later

Oregon State Representative Paul Evans (Monmouth) (Photo courtesy of Evans’s website)

Today, Oregon State Representative Paul Evans (D-Monmouth) voted for a procedural motion to bring a Republican-sponsored Measure 110 repeal bill to the House floor for an up or down vote before he voted against it just minutes later.

Soon after the House convened for business today at 11 a.m., Republican leader Jeff Helfrich moved to bring the bill, HB 4036, to the floor from committee, where majority Democrats have blocked it. The motion requires 31 votes (a majority of the House’s 60 members) to pass. The result of the vote was 30-28, one vote shy of passing. Seven Democrats, including Evans, voted for the motion. Two Republicans were tallied as excused absences.

By the time the result of the first vote was announced, one of the previously absent Republicans, Lucetta Elmer from McMinnville, had arrived in the chamber. Republicans quickly moved again to withdraw HB 4036 from committee. On the second try, the motion failed again, 30-29, with Elmer voting in favor and Evans, this time, voting nay.

Had either motion passed, the House would next have voted whether to approve the Republican bill, putting Democrats in the difficult position of voting for the GOP bill and scuttling the party’s careful negotiations on its own, more limited Measure 110 reform bill, or voting against the GOP bill and going on the record opposing a clean and tough hard drug recriminalization bill.

Evans’s vote switch rescued his fellow Democrats from that conundrum, but put him in the unenviable position of having changed his vote for apparently partisan reasons.

I called Evans’s office around 4:15 this afternoon. The very nice woman who answered the phone told me no one was available to talk about Evans’s vote switch. She allowed that I was the first person to contact the office seeking comment. I did not hear further from Evans’s office prior to my deadline of 6 pm.

The close votes highlight the tightrope legislative Democrats are attempting to walk as they respond to intense voter anger over Measure 110’s decriminalization of hard drugs including fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine. The enactment of Measure 110, approved by voters in 2020, has accompanied a startling increase in drug overdose deaths in Oregon. Polling over the last year has consistently shown that large majorities Oregonians of all parties and all geographic regions support a full repeal of Measure 110.

House Bill 4036, the Republican bill, would recriminalize possession of user amounts of hard drugs with a maximum sentence of a year, and the ability to avoid jail by going through addiction treatment. The bill would also dissolve the Measure 110 Oversight and Accountability Committee, members of which have repeatedly urged state officials to use state resources to defend the measure, according to exclusive reporting by Oregon Roundup.

A work in progress, the most recent version of the Democrat bill, HB 4002, would limit sentences for drug possession to 180 days, establish a controversial new county-managed “deflection” program that does not yet exist and leaves Oregon Health Authority, and the Oversight and Accountability Committee, in charge of Measure 110 spending. The Democrat bill is the result of delicate negotiations between moderates, who mostly represent districts with healthy Republican voter registration numbers, and more progressive members who have more to fear from a primary challenge, in which an opponent from the left may benefit from the largesse of Drug Policy Alliance and other drug decriminalization fans.

Evans was first elected to House District 20 in 2014. The district includes West Salem, Monmouth and Independence. He most recently won re-election in 2022 by ten points against a Republican challenger.

Kevin Chambers, a Republican who formerly served as West Salem Neighborhood Chair according to his website, has filed to challenge Evans this year.