2025 Legislative Session

We, the MCAT Transportation Committee (Mobilizing Climate Action Together), are writing in support of passing this stopgap bill to sustain maintenance and safety of our transportation system at current levels of function.

While this session had significant disappointments, MCAT members’ great work guided many bills successfully, and they ended so close to success, but stuck in the Ways & Means Committee in this year of funding uncertainty. These bills are stepping stones to success in that they passed out of committee and many of them might have become law in a year with more available funding. They are bills we are likely to try again.

Requires the State Treasurer and the Oregon Investment Council to manage climate change risks to the state’s public pension fund.

Imposes a severance tax on owners of timber harvested from public or private forestland

Requires businesses that cook, assemble, process, serve or sell food to recover and dispose of food waste.

Requires Oregon electric utilities to create strategic plans to incorporate Grid Enhancement Technologies into their future plans.

Creates a State Public Finance Task Force to study public banking and other public financing options.

Requires Oregon’s Department of Energy to expand its all-encompassing, single-resource directory of energy efficiency and incentives programs

Streamline regulations to enable faster and simpler transmission planning.

Directs Oregon’s Public Utilities Commission to establish a pilot program for natural gas companies to develop heating and cooling networks

Allows Oregon's Public Utility Commission to regulate electric companies under a new framework that better reflects the public interest.

Requires electric companies to impose a charge on big data centers that are large electricity consumers, and mitigate any increased costs to other consumers.

Requires ODOE to develop and implement a state-wide Disaster Reserves Plan for liquid fuels.

Requires DEQ to produce a strategic energy storage transition plan by 2026.

Requires gas utilities to notify the Public Utility Commission before blending hydrogen with natural gas

Requires owner/operators of landfills to regularly monitor and report methane emissions from its surface

Requires electric companies to develop programs for expanding distributed power plants

Requires new rules for accelerating the transition to zero-emission school buses.

Requires owners of bulk oil or liquid fuels terminals to show they can pay for spills.

NOTE – MCAT has taken a position IN OPPOSITION to this bill! Prohibits the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality from implementing its regulations on zero emissions trucks, until January 1, 2027.

Creates a ballot measure that, if passed, creates a new state right to a healthy environment