A3
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2019
State lawmakers release
two-year budget draft
Astoria man pleads
no contest to
attempted murder
By BRENNA VISSER
The Daily Astorian
A Fern Hill man
accused of walking
into a Westport wom-
an’s house and chas-
ing her with a chain-
saw pleaded no contest
Thursday to attempted
murder .
Loren Shaun Knapp,
57, was charged with
attempted
murder,
attempted
fi rst-de-
gree assault, fi rst-de-
gree burglary and other
charges related to the
incident last May.
Knapp apparently
drove to the Westport
home in search of a
man who he believed
stole his rifl e, Dep-
uty District Attorney
Beau Peterson said.
He entered the home
and began chasing the
woman inside with the
chainsaw. He said he
was going to kill her
and sawed through a
bedroom door.
He left the house
and began confronting
the man outside before
deciding
to leave
the scene,
Peter-
son said
during
a
court
hearing.
Sheriff ’s Loren Shaun
Knapp
deputies
arrested
Knapp near the home
shortly after.
Knapp is sched-
uled to be sentenced
next week. Attempted
murder is a Measure
11 crime that carries a
mandatory minimum
sentence of 7½ years in
prison.
As part of a plea
deal, the rest of
Knapp’s charges have
been dismissed by the
prosecution.
Knapp has been
arrested in Clatsop
County more than 25
times — including for
charges of burglary,
criminal mischief, men-
acing, assault, animal
abuse and stalking.
Johnson a key
player in process
By MARK MILLER
Oregon Capital Bureau
Ethics commission rejects
settlement with ex-fi rst lady
By GORDON R.
FRIEDMAN
The Oregonian
said.
Steiner
Hayward
was one of
two sena-
tors named
to co-chair
Ways and Betsy Johnson
Means for
this session. State Sen.
Betsy Johnson, D-Scap-
poose, said the three
co-chairs have worked well
together, and she suggested
that their geographic diver-
sity helped guide their bud-
get proposal. All are from
western Oregon, but John-
son represents a mostly
rural district northwest of
Portland, Steiner Hayward
represents an urban district
on Portland’s w est side, and
‘FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY
CAREER IN THE SENATE, IT IS
REFRESHING TO GET A GLIMPSE
AT A BUDGET FRAMEWORK
THAT IS FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE
AND WILL LEAVE A HEALTHY
ENDING BALANCE.’
State Sen. Herman Baertschiger Jr., R-Grants Pass
The Oregon Health Plan
isn’t entirely spared from
cuts the way that the state
schools fund is, but Steiner
Hayward, who is a prac-
ticing physician, said the
co-chairs are proposing no
cuts to patient services.
“There may be some
areas of savings for admin-
istration, but we will not be
cutting eligibility or bene-
fi ts for any Oregonian who
receives services or is eli-
gible for services through
OHP,” Steiner Hayward
Rayfi eld represents part of
the mid-Willamette Valley.
“We all brought our own
ability to project the con-
cerns of all of Oregon into
this budget,” Johnson said.
Rayfi eld said the com-
mittee’s job is to balance
the cost of government ser-
vices with the available
resources.
“This is not a perfect
budget,” he said. “There
will be folks who are not
happy with this budget. ”
The Senate Republican
leader isn’t one of those
folks.
“For the fi rst time in my
career in the Senate, it is
refreshing to get a glimpse
at a budget framework that
is fi scally responsible and
will leave a healthy ending
balance,” said Sen. Herman
Baertschiger Jr., R-Grants
Pass, in a statement released
shortly after the budget was
unveiled Thursday.
Johnson, Rayfi eld and
Steiner Hayward said keep-
ing Oregon fi nancially sta-
ble is one of their main
objectives. They want to
avoid deeper cuts in the
coming decade, especially
if the state’s economy slows
down.
“This takes a signifi -
cant step toward creating
sustainable buadgets in the
future,” Rayfi eld said.
The
Legislature
is
required to approve a bal-
anced budget for the next
biennium by the end of
June. With both the gov-
ernor’s budget proposal
and the Ways and Means
co-chairs’ plan now on the
table, the state’s leaders
have until the end of the
legislative session to ham-
mer out an agreement.
The Oregon Capital
Bureau is a collaboration
between EO Media Group,
Pamplin Media Group and
Salem Reporter.
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State ethics commis-
sioners on Thursday unan-
imously rejected a pro-
posed settlement with
ex-fi rst lady Cylvia Hayes,
Commissioner Dan Mason
said.
Hayes had agreed in
January to a $44,000 fi ne
for breaking ethics laws 22
times. But the settlement
needed fi nal approval from
the Oregon Government
Ethics Commission.
Hayes did not attend
the commission meeting,
and her absence was a fac-
tor in the vote against the
settlement.
“All of us felt offended
that she would not appear
in person,” Mason said.
Ethics
investigators
concluded Hayes abused
her access to Gov. John
Kitzhaber, her longtime
fi ancé, to land consulting
work that paid more than
$200,000.
Federal and state pros-
ecutors declined to seek
criminal charges against
Hayes and Kitzhaber.
But the couple’s actions
sparked an infl uence ped-
dling scandal that led to
Kitzhaber’s
resignation
and Hayes’ bankruptcy.
Thursday’s vote sends
Hayes and the state back to
the drawing board, leaving
her ethics case pending as
offi cials and Hayes’ law-
yers renegotiate a potential
settlement.
If and when one is
reached, said Michael
Fuller, Hayes’ bankruptcy
attorney, the former fi rst
lady’s fi nes would likely
be forgiven because she
has fi led for bankruptcy.
Hayes has to make a
good-faith effort to pay her
debts, Fuller said. Even so,
what she pays of an even-
tual ethics fi ne would be
“pennies on the dollar,” he
said.
“The vast majority of
the fi ne would be forgiven,
if not all of it,” Fuller said.
That fact didn’t set
well with the ethics
commissioners.
“The discussion among
all of us led to wonder-
ing if she would even pay
anything,” Mason said,
“which tipped the scale on
rejecting the agreement, in
my opinion.”
Kitzhaber settled his
own ethics case last year,
agreeing to a $20,000 fi ne
for 10 violations.
An element of Hayes’
bankruptcy proceedings
involves a debt of about
$125,000 owed to The
Oregonian for attorney
fees stemming from a court
case in which the newspa-
per prevailed in its attempt
to access Hayes’ emails.
Fuller said he and the
newspaper’s
attorneys
have been negotiating for
months and have reached a
tentative settlement which
will soon be presented to
the court. The newspa-
per’s attorney in the mat-
ter, Brad Daniels, was not
immediately
available
for comment. Willamette
Week fi rst reported the
negotiations.
“We have a deal ham-
mered out,” Fuller said,
“and it’s a fair deal.”
Oregon’s K-12 schools
won’t feel pinched under a
proposal unveiled by leg-
islative
budget-writers
Thursday, but other gov-
ernment services through-
out the state are likely to
see cuts.
The co-chairs of the
Joint Ways and Means
Committee presented a
$23.2 billion budget plan.
That represents a 10 percent
increase from the approved
2017-19 state budget, but
not enough to maintain cur-
rent service levels.
Spending in nearly every
area of the budget comes
in below what state econo-
mists say will be needed to
keep service levels steady
over the next two years.
That would likely mean
public employee layoffs,
less grant money available
to organizations and munic-
ipalities that rely on state
support, and other reduc-
tions as Oregon’s state gov-
ernment tightens its belt.
In her $23.6 billion bud-
get proposal released late
last year, Gov. Kate Brown
called for spending $8.8
billion in general and lot-
tery revenues for the K-12
state school fund, the main
source of money for school
districts throughout Ore-
gon. The legislators did
likewise in their proposal.
“We’re putting $668 mil-
lion more into the current
service level than the pre-
vious biennium, which is a
non trivial sum of money,”
state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner
Hayward,
D-Beaverton,
said. “We’re doing the best
we can with the available
resources. We recognize
that it’s not ideal.”
State Rep. Dan Rayfi eld,
D-Corvallis vowed that
lawmakers will be “work-
ing this entire session to try
and fi nd more money” for
public education.
Unlike Brown’s bud-
get, the lawmakers’ pro-
posal does not assume any
tax increases will give bud-
get-writers more money to
spread around. Brown rec-
ommended changing Ore-
gon’s business tax code and
ending payments to coun-
ties under the Gain Share
program, lessening the need
for state budget cuts.
The cost of provid-
ing public services tends
to increase every year due
to infl ation, cost-of-living
adjustments for employees,
rising pension obligations
and other economic factors.
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