BEND — Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek sat down Wednesday, Feb. 28, for a one-hour video roundtable with editors and reporters from EO Media Group newspapers to discuss her goals for the state, including plans to increase housing, fix faltering schools and listen to the needs of Eastern Oregonians.

Kotek kicked off the discussion by mentioning that her view of needs around the state had been shaped in part by last year’s One Oregon Listening Tour, during which she met with residents of all 36 counties.

Kotek said among her top priorities this year is work to address Oregon’s homelessness issue and housing shortfall though Senate Bill 1537, a half-billion-dollar measure aimed at increasing affordable housing stock throughout the state.

“We are very close to seeing that come to a conclusion,” Kotek said. “It is a comprehensive proposal to bring a set of tools that we need to really improve our housing production across the state and all communities. I heard it on my visits. Everybody has a housing problem.”

Another area of focus, Kotek said, is the homelessness crisis. The governor noted that she had extended her declaration of a homelessness emergency for this year.

“The emergency order is still in effect,” she said. “We are focusing again on prevention, rent assistance, giving people a house so they don’t need to be served because they’ve lost their housing and then focusing on rehousing people who have gone into the expanding shelter systems that we’ve created to get stable, helping them get rehoused.”

In response to a question about the rates that private forest and rangeland owners pay to the Oregon Department of Forestry for wildfire protection, Kotek said she is focused on promoting House Bill 4133 in the current legislative session.

The bill would reduce wildfire protection fees and increase taxes on timber harvest. Protection fees increased by more than 50% for some landowners east of the Cascades in 2023.

“I think it is creating some solutions that we need right now, particularly the issue for property owners east of the Cascades on our rangelands,” Kotek said of House Bill 4133. “The increase in the cost has been substantial, so at this point I’m working to get the bill passed.”

In response to a question about increasing housing construction, Kotek said a bill the legislature is considering would include technical assistance grants to help local communities promote construction.

“That was a really important thing for a lot of folks,” Kotek said. “(We’re looking at) infrastructure investment and some of the things around workforce housing incentives. So we’re glad to see those in the bill.”

A group of young journalists from Central Oregon high schools who participated in the roundtable asked the governor how she planned to remedy poor educational outcomes in Oregon public schools, which consistently rank at or near the bottom of the 50 states in overall performance.

Kotek conceded that the state’s reading numbers are “abysmal,” and she said a focus has been working with programs to bolster training for teachers in reading instruction. The governor said she is working to support early literacy, technical education and summer learning, in addition to pursuing better compensation for educators as a way to address the problem.

“I am committed to looking at the formula of how schools are funded, making sure we can modernize it and address the core functional needs of our districts, and that includes compensation for educators,” she said.

Asked about the top need for Eastern Oregon, and how she plans to address it, Kotek again talked about housing.

“It really does come back to housing for me, and housing production is coordinated a little differently in every community,” she said.

Kotek recalled visiting John Day last year and hearing a presentation on new 3D-printed home construction. She talked about the need for such novel approaches and the importance of local knowledge in addressing the unique needs of each community.

“There is a lot of innovation going on,” she said. “So we need to do the regular sticks and bricks, and then we need innovation and we need all different types of housing options, and we have to make sure we meet what the community’s needs are, particularly rural and frontier communities. I really have to visit so I get a sense of the landscape and the size of the communities and meeting the individual needs of the communities — making sure that the tools that we’re putting on the table will actually meet those specific needs.”