HOUSE BILL 3205A

Oregon employers say they’re not allowed to offer signing and retention bonuses. BOLI and a key lawmaker disagree.

CHIEF SPONSORS: Reps. Janelle Bynum (D-Happy Valley) and Mark Helfrich (R-Hood River) and Sen. James Manning (D-Eugene)

WHAT IT WOULD DO: Allow public- and private-sector employers to offer signing and retention bonuses, provided they don’t discriminate when doing so.

When lawmakers passed a landmark pay equity law in 2017—applying to all employers, not just government agencies—they were trying to correct historical imbalances that between a $100 fine or calling a number for addiction treatment. If that detail remains hazy, it’s because Portland police have issued only about 500 citations for possession since the new law went into effect.

That is, until last week.

On Monday, May 8, cops handed out 43 citations—a record number, according to a list of citations obtained by WW from the Multnomah County Circuit Court. On Tuesday, May 9, police broke their record again with 63.

The Portland Police Bureau’s bike squad, which patrols downtown, made a decision to start making use of the underused tickets. “Alongside paramedics and firefighters, those officers are on the front lines of this crisis,” PPB spokesman Kevin Allen tells WW. “They’re directly seeing all the overdoses and violent crime associated with abuse of street drugs, and we’ve heard from the community that they want to see us try to address open drug use.”

It comes at a crucial time. Fentanyl overdoses are sweeping Portland. Statewide, opioid overdoses tripled between 2019 and 2021, and the situation appears to be getting more dire. The Police Bureau warned Portlanders on Sunday about a “potentially dangerous batch of drugs circulating the street marketplace.” Police are now investigating a string of eight fatal overdoses that occurred last weekend, some involving fentanyl that users thought was cocaine.

But it’s unclear if more citations will result in fewer deaths. That’s because the citations are pushing few people into treatment.

When Portland cops hand out a citation, they pass along a card with a phone number for Lines for Life, 503-575-3769. The hotline is staffed by people who have gone through recovery themselves, and they provide both referrals to treatment and a mailed letter that callers can bring to court to waive the $100 fine.

The process takes from about 15 minutes to an hour. But only 32 people in Multnomah County have done it, according to data from Lines for Life.

Of those, only five have actually submitted the required paperwork to get their fines waived, according to Multnomah County Circuit Court data obtained by WW. That’s a success rate of around 1%.

As of Friday, only 10 people had paid the fine. A few dozen had pay white men more than women and far more than people of color. That law included eight “bona fide factors” that allowed pay differences, such as experience or quantity or quality of production. But a shortage of workers was not included among the factors.

When pandemic-related worker shortages became rampant, the state created a temporary exemption, specifically allowing employers to pay signing and retention bonuses. But that exemption expired in September 2022.

PROBLEM IT SEEKS TO SOLVE: Like many states, Oregon faces a shortage of skilled workers, including but not limited to nurses, teachers, cops and bus drivers. In other states, including those surrounding Oregon, employers have taken to offering substantial signing bonuses to attract workers and have also offered retention bonuses in order to hold on to existing employees.

One example: The most recent edition of the Oregon Board of Nursing’s Sentinel newsletter included help-wanted ads from many of the state’s leading hospitals. All extolled the merits of the institutions and the work. But only one of the ads—from Palmdale Hospital in Palmdale, Calif.—offered a signing bonus: in that case, up to $20,000.

In another example, C-Tran, the transit their cases dismissed. For the rest, their cases are eventually sent to collections.

Law enforcement’s lack of interest in writing citations has long been a target of criticism. A state audit released earlier this year highlighted “variability” across jurisdictions in officers’ enthusiasm for writing citations and encouraging people to call the hotline. (Cops in tiny Josephine County have handed out twice as many citations as those in Multnomah.)

State Rep. Rob Nosse (D-Portland) says he’s happy the city’s cops are now embracing the system, and he hopes it will inform legislative efforts to fix some of Measure 110’s weaknesses. “If no local governments are enforcing it,” he says, “we won’t get any good information.”

Tera Hurst, executive director of the Oregon Health Justice Recovery Alliance, which advocates for Measure 110, emphasizes that the system is a work in progress. She says she’s pushing legislators to create a workgroup to address issues in the citation system, such as the lack of law enforcement training on how to use it and the fact that the hotline number isn’t simply printed on the citation.

“We didn’t have something that worked before,” Hurst says, referring to the criminalization of drug use. “Now we’re trying to figure out what will.”

What isn’t working was obvious on a visit to downtown Portland on a recent Sunday.

“No one wants treatment,” said a member of a group clutching tooters and passing around tinfoil under an eave along Southwest Harvey Milk Street near 5th Avenue (an area “rife with drug use and sales,” PPB says). “Out here it’s easier to get drugs than it is to get food.”

But another man under that eave, 22-year-old Hunter Vera, told WW a different story.

He’s been on the streets and in and out of drug treatment since a weed habit took a turn for the worse a few years back. Last week, he received his first citation. “I had no idea it was illegal,” he said.

When asked if he’d called the hotline on the card handed to him by a cop, he looked confused. “Nobody has phones,” Vera said. “How are you supposed to call?”

He said he’d just come back from the detox center after being turned away because of a lack of beds. “I don’t want to do this shit,” he said. “I want to stop, but I physically can’t.” agency for Clark County, Wash., is offering signing bonuses to new bus drivers, while TriMet’s reading of current Oregon law is that it cannot legally do the same. Although some lawmakers and legislative lawyers disagree, many employers believe TriMet is correct and that Oregon is the only state in the country where employers cannot offer such bonuses.

WHO SUPPORTS IT: Desperate employers have turned out at public hearings this session to testify they should be allowed to offer bonuses to beef up their staffs. Among the most vocal: TriMet, Portland Public Schools, Washington County, Kaiser Permanente, and the Oregon Truckers Associations. Bonuses work, TriMet lobbyist Miles Pengilly told lawmakers: In the 10 months prior to April 2022, the transit agency received 900 applications from prospective drivers. When it offered $7,500 signing bonuses, applications nearly quadrupled in the next 10 months.

WHO OPPOSES IT: The bill took an unusual turn last week. Although it passed the House without a single “no” vote on April 14, the Senate Committee on Business and Labor substantially amended the bill based on testimony from such groups as Family Forward, the Oregon AFL-CIO, and the state’s largest public employee union, Service Employees International Union Local 503.

Those groups declared themselves neutral but pointed out that employers giving bonuses might, in the words of Family Forward lobbyist Courtney Veronneau, “create a loophole that would allow bonuses based on implicit bias.” Veronneau and others cited research that has found employers pay workers like themselves more than others with similar qualifications. That’s part of why white men, who disproportionately hold hiring authority, pay white men more than others.

Rather than simply allowing employers to pay bonuses, the amended bill would go first to the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries for rulemaking to ensure that hiring and retention bonuses comply with pay equity standards. Senate Business and Labor Committee chair Kathleen Taylor (D-Portland) heard from employers that they did not support the amended bill, but she defended her committee’s choice. “I don’t think the answer to solving our workforce shortages is to allow bonuses that create inequities in pay,” Taylor said.

The committee sent the bill to the Senate floor where it will rest until Republicans return. NIGEL JAQUISS.