Lawmakers in charge of Oregon’s Ways and Means Committee set the record for earliest budget release last week.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Lawmakers in charge of Oregon’s Ways and Means Committee set the record for earliest budget release last week.
Sen. Richard Devlin, D-Tualatin, and Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland, released a plan heavy on education spending with some cuts to government services — the Statesman Journal reports:
An early budget framework allows for deeper conversations and more public input, Devlin said. It allows lawmakers more time to listen to people who have concerns about how the money is being spent, and it allows them more time to decide together how to best accommodate those concerns, he said.
“You have to make a lot of decisions, and you have to be very disciplined in those decisions,” he said.
As lawmakers in Salem work on the 2015 budget, a large transportation project is set to get under way in Florence.
Cost-wise, the [$37 million renovation of the Siuslaw River Bridge] work is one of the larger jobs on the state’s list, Little said. Part of the cost is due to temporary work bridges that workers will have to build next to the Siuslaw River Bridge. They’ll have to time their work in windows when the project will have minimal impact on fish habitats.
The goal is to start construction around April, and wrap up by spring 2019, Little said.
Read more at the Register Guard.
