With the final budgets advanced to votes of the House and Senate, including an agreement on the two-year budget for the state prison system, Oregon lawmakers were headed toward ending their 2011 session today.
With the final budgets advanced to votes of the House and Senate, including an agreement on the two-year budget for the state prison system, Oregon lawmakers were headed toward ending their 2011 session today.
A last-minute deal Wednesday on a congressional redistricting plan extended the session to the full 150 days that lawmakers budgeted for two years ago.
For more than two weeks, Democrats and Republicans had been deadlocked about how to fill a gap of about $20 million in the $1.36 billion budget of the Department of Corrections.
Legislative budget writers agreed to tap unspent bond funds, as Republicans wanted.
In a separate proposal (Senate Bill 730) that Democrats wanted, lawmakers also agreed to a two-year extension of a 60-day limit for holding probation violators unless they are convicted of new crimes. The limit was part of a 2009 law that delayed longer prison sentences for repeat property and drug offenders under Ballot Measure 57, approved in 2008. Measure 57 will take effect in this budget cycle.
