SALEM, Ore. — A contentious proposal to uphold last year’s decision to remove the gray wolf from the state’s endangered species list has cleared one of its last major hurdles at the Oregon Legislature.
House Bill 4040 passed out of committee on Tuesday in a 3-2 vote and now heads to the Senate, which will have the final say as to whether it goes to Gov. Kate Brown’s desk for signing into law.
The bill would ratify the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission’s decision in November to delist the species, a move that is not itself an automatic greenlight for killing wolves but allows hunting to eventually be considered as one of several management tools under the state’s wolf plan.
Upholding a state agency’s decision such as this in state law is an unusual move by the Oregon Legislature. It’s intended to render moot an ongoing lawsuit filed by wildlife conservationists, who want to challenge the scientific merits of that delisting decision through a judicial review.
At the beginning of the legislative session, some House lawmakers touted the bill as merely a mechanism for the legislature to shore up its support of the Fish and Wildlife Commission’s decision, saying it would have no impact on litigation.
But when the bill moved to the Senate, a committee determined the intent was in fact to thwart the lawsuit, although the likelihood of success of that strategy has been a point of debate.
“It’s hard for me to really see the purpose of this legislation,” Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, said during Tuesday’s hearing. “If the judicial review goes forward, that’s not going to change the way the wolves are managed. I ask myself ‘Why are we doing this?’ And at this point, I don’t feel that we’ve had a satisfactory answer.”
Sen. Chris Edwards, D-Eugene, who sided with the committee’s two Republicans in favoring the bill, disagreed with Dembrow about the legislature’s role.
“I think forcing people into the room, a conference room not a courtroom, is a more productive setting,” Edwards said. “And people have squared off, groups have squared off, and everyone’s preparing for a lawsuit and I don’t think that that produces as good of outcomes.”
Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, blasted the bill in a letter he sent to state Senate Democrats on Monday, saying the bill’s intent to pre-empt the judicial review process is an “extreme precedent-setting measure.”
“It is critical that management decisions be driven by science, not politics. Judicial review is an essential component of this process,” DeFazio wrote. “The concerns regarding whether or not the Department did a proper analysis and used the best available science should be subject to judicial review. To do otherwise flies in the face of all the progress the state has made thus far in wolf recovery efforts. It is simply, not how we do things in Oregon.”
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