Update on SB449a

Hello Everyone!

I’m Chad A. Ludwig, President of Oregon Association of the Deaf.

I wanted to take a moment to update the community on the status of Senate Bill 449A which would establish the Office for Deaf, Deaf-Blind and Hard of Hearing Services. The bill has made good progress so far, and everyone - all of you who have been involved and worked together to let the legislators in the House and Senate know how important this bill is to you - you’ve really done a wonderful job!

At this time, the legislators have 250 bills waiting to be considered during the next session. Let’s pretend as we are guessing they will only accept 50 - but we don’t know how many they will accept for sure.

Senate Bill 449A has been submitted to the Ways and Means Committee. The Ways and Means Committee needs to approve the bill to move to the Ways and Means Commission of Human Services for further examination and consideration. The referral of SB 449a to the Ways and Means Committee of Human Services has been on hold since the last week in March.

It has been on hold for several reasons. For example, they were waiting for the State budge report, waiting for a big budget bill related to DSHS and the Department of Transportation, along with a number of other things. After all those items were taken care, SB 449A was the only thing left. We were anxiously waiting because this session is ending soon.

Well, I found out last week that the legislators plan to reject Bill 449A. They feel that more research needs to be done to fully understand what is really needed to set up services for the community.

After much discussion, it was decided that in order to move forward, a new budget line item will be added to DSHS SB 5026. This item will ensure $200,000 for the next two years, 2015 - 2017. This will be budgeted as $100,000 for each year.

This money is budgeted to go towards research such as conducting a community needs assessments and gathering as much information as possible related to Deaf, Deaf-Blind, Deaf Plus and Hard of Hearing populations. The goal is to get involvement from as many people as possible in our community with a wide range of people with various backgrounds experience. They want a robust snapshot of our community and to understand what people’s needs are, what they are looking for, and what services need to be in place.

So all of that is included in this new line item. All the details have been worked out, and it has been signed. The money will be available to the needs assessment commission, or it may be used by some other group. There may even be an RFP for this study to be done. We will have to wait and see how that develops.

We will be able to give you more information when we get more information about what the entire process will look like.

So, the bad news is, that SB 449a did not pass as we’d hoped. But the good news is that there is money budgeted to do a needs assessment which is really wonderful.

Now we need to do the work in the next two years to gather and submit all the reports to the 2017 Legislative Session for their examination.

Carry on United!