Would you look at that: Your Oregon Legislature wrapped up its short session last Thursday, March 7, a couple of days ahead of schedule. And, perhaps even more remarkable, it did so in what appeared to be a relatively bipartisan fashion.

Among the session’s top priorities was House Bill 4002, which will recriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs and roll back parts of Measure 110, the initiative voters passed in 2020. House Bill 4002 also outlines provisions to offer drug users multiple opportunities to enter treatment after an encounter with a police officer. Gov. Tina Kotek said last week she intended to sign the measure.

Will House Bill 4002 curb the epidemic of addiction in Oregon? Much will depend on how the state funds these county-by-county “deflection” programs that aim to get drug users into treatment. You might have noticed the Chieftain’s brief news item about how Sheriff Ryan Moody and County Attorney Rebecca Frolander plan to wait until some of the details come into clearer focus, and that seems wise in the short term.

And there are still questions to answer about how all of this will affect Oregon’s beleaguered court system.

As for those proponents who argued that recriminalizing drug possession is a step backward, they raised some valid points — but those were washed away in large part by the flood of lethal fentanyl that has swept into Oregon, shattering lives and families. Anyone who thought legislators would leave Salem without rolling back at least some parts of Measure 110 just wasn’t correctly reading the political tea leaves — especially in an election year.

The Legislature’s other top priority going into the short session involved allocating additional resources to help boost housing production across Oregon. Lawmakers passed a $376 million package of bills that includes money for infrastructure funding, homebuilding, homeless shelters and rent assistance, along with changes to state land use laws to make it easier for cities to build homes.

That should be a step forward, but we’ll want to watch carefully to see how much of that money makes its way to Eastern Oregon to meet needs here. Also, as residents of the city of Wallowa learned as they waited for money to help recover from the devastating 2023 hailstorm, there can be unexpected bumps and delays along the way while administrators decide how and when to allocate money.

All in all, this seemed like a surprisingly productive session, but there is at least one shocking oversight: Senate Bill 1548, which would have switched Oregon from daylight saving time to standard time year-round, passed the Senate but never got out of the House. This is particularly timely, of course, because we all made the biannual switch last Sunday morning as we transitioned to daylight saving time, losing an hour they say we’ll get back in the fall. But do we really? That’s up for debate in a nation that suffers from chronic sleep deprivation.

Our position on the time switch by now is, we suspect, fairly well-known, but let us summarize: It’s bad. The spring switch in particular increasingly is linked to real health issues.

Senate Bill 1548 wouldn’t have changed this nonsense immediately — the measure would have gone into effect only if California and Washington state did the same and moved permanently to standard time. So we weren’t under any illusion that we would be freed any time soon from the chore of trying to track down and reset every last timekeeping device in the house. But the bill was a little ray of hope that now has disappeared — just like that missing hour of sleep Sunday.