Test drive for annual sessions: Oregon lawmakers, who meet every other year, decided to see how a more frequent approach would work.

• Author: Wong, Peter

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To meet or not to meet? That's the question these days in Oregon as lawmakers wrestle with the issue of whether to go from biennial to yearly sessions.

The Oregon Legislative Assembly has met every other year since statehood in 1859.

Short of the governor summoning them back to Salem for a special session, legislators dealt with budget matters between sessions with a board consisting of the presiding officers, budget committee chairmen from the previous session, and other legislators appointed by the leaders and ratified by the chambers.

The Emergency Board, as it is called, was increased this year from 17 to 20 members, but still is a small fraction of the 30 senators and 60 representatives. Other matters generally waited for the next biennial session.

Oregon is one of only six states where legislators meet every other year. Kentucky used to be the seventh state, but voters approved a change to the constitution in 2000, and its General Assembly held its first annual session in 2001. Arkansas voters will decide in November if they want their General Assembly to switch to annual sessions.

"Practically every state has gone to annual sessions over the years. I think there's a reason for it," says Alan Rosenthal, a professor of public policy and political science at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. "A legislature simply has to be around on a regular basis in order to behave as a coequal branch of government."

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At least some Oregon lawmakers agree with Rosenthal.

Lawmakers tried out an annual session this year, ahead of asking voters for a permanent change. If passed during next year's session, such a measure could appear on a special election ballot in 2009 or, more likely, on the primary ballot in 2010.

The every-other-year schedule frustrates some lawmakers, who say they don't have time to get the state's business done.

"You cannot put together a budget for Oregon and you cannot react to Oregon's needs in education, health, safety and natural resources if we meet for just a few months every two years," says Senate President Peter Courtney, the legislature's senior member, who in his 24 years has served in 15 special sessions.

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CHANGE AHEAD

Calls for change have been building in recent years. Two legislative review commissions in 1968 and 1974 urged a move toward annual sessions.

Voters approved a constitutional change in 1976 that allows legislators to call themselves into session in an emergency, although it had been invoked only once before this year. With no active campaign for or against it, voters rejected the last ballot measure on annual sessions in 1990, but by a margin of just 5,000 of almost 600,000 votes cast.

When Richard Devlin came to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1997, he says the schedule made it tough to gear up for the session.

"Each session was an entirely new beginning. You did something during that time, and then it all went...