The Senate Democrats have killed the tobacco licensure bill, marking it as a sacrificial lamb and giving in to the ransoming tactics that the Senate Republicans had deployed to block the Democratic agenda.
The last days of the 2016 session came down to a game of chicken between Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, and Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, as the Republicans imposed D.C.-style delaying tactics, first demanding that the full legal language of every bill be read aloud before any vote could be taken, a process that took hours.
When that didn’t phase the Democrats, the Senate Republicans accelerated their tactics and stopped showing up for work on the Senate floor, preventing the Senate from achieving a quorum and daring Courtney to send the authorities to their caucus room to compel them to the floor.
The Democrats got through most of their most controversial measures, but before the filibustering tactics stopped, Ferrioli still forced Courtney to swerve, and Senate Bill 1559, which required a state retail license to sell tobacco or e-cigarettes, was chucked out the window, along with several other bills.
Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Beaverton, the bill’s champion, was livid at its defeat. “I don’t blame the [Democratic] leadership. I blame the Republicans entirely for their childish tactics,” she said in the moments following the bill’s defeat. “It’s frustrating to me that politics came ahead of the health of children.”
The ranking Republican on the Senate Health Committee, Sen. Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg, said the tobacco licensure bill was killed because it was the most the Democrats would give them. “They weren’t willing to give up very much. They weren’t willing to give up RPS.”
RPS stands for Renewable Portfolio Standard -- the bill that requires electric utilities to phase out their purchase of power generated from fossil fuels. Republicans drew a line in the sand against that bill and others they saw as overly partisan, such as the bill that would give Oregon the highest minimum wage in the nation.
Steiner Hayward, along with her co-sponsor, Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson, D-Gresham, had worked many hours for the past two years to require state tobacco licenses, believing that the lack of legal consequences has led to higher than acceptable sales to minors.
Currently, a clerk who sells cigarettes to minors may face criminal sanctions, but the clerk’s employers face no penalty. But if SB 1559 had passed, a tobacco vendor could lose its license by repeatedly selling cigarettes or nicotine vapor to underage kids.
The concern was high enough in Multnomah County that the local government passed its own licensing law in 2015 after the Legislature failed to act last year. SB 1559 was modeled after Multnomah County’s ordinance, and went a step further by requiring vape shops to be licensed as well as traditional tobacco retailers.
Kruse objected to the bill because Courtney and Steiner Hayward chose not to adopt an amendment he sought that restricted the Department of Revenue to set fees based on the square footage of the store -- a policy he said was borrowed from the laws regarding alcohol retail licensure.
“We wanted to put some sideboards on how they charge their fees,” he said. “We couldn’t get them to go there.”
Big Tobacco has been a reliable pipeline of campaign cash for Oregon Republicans, but Steiner Hayward said Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris and manufacturer of Marlboro cigarettes, was willing to cooperate on a license to prevent minor sales.
Instead, she blamed the lobbyist for the Neighborhood Store Association, Richard Kosesan, by name, for turning SB 1559 into a partisan bargaining chip. She had already agreed to one amendment on Kosesan’s behalf, temporarily capping the fee at $300 -- less than the Multnomah County licensing fee of $500.
It wouldn’t be the first time the special interest groups tried to move the goalposts on the tobacco licensing issue. Last summer, another Beaverton Democrat, Sen. Mark Hass, threw up his hands after multiple parties at the negotiating table moved apart on an agreement, and he killed a similar bill.
This year again, Steiner Hayward had to deal with unhappy parties on both sides; anti-tobacco lobbyists opposed her legislation because it pre-empted more rigorous local ordinances that might restrict the location and the kind of business that may sell nicotine products, a compromised she forged with the Northwest Grocery Association to gain its support.
She crafted a new compromise that would allow local governments to prevent new stores with less than 5000 square feet to sell tobacco near schools -- a move that got the anti-tobacco advocates to drop their opposition and others, like the Oregon Nurses Association, to support her bill.
Kruse said he would support a tobacco licensure bill that kept state agencies on a short leash, but Steiner Hayward said she would not reintroduce the bill next year. “I feel we’ve lost our opportunity to enact statewide legislation. So many jurisdictions will have enacted their own ordinances, there will be no appetite for enacting a statewide license,” she said, while regretfully noting that many pockets of the state may never require a license.
