A Million Dollars to be available to the Oregon State Marine Boards Abandoned and Derelict Boat funds.
This is a recap from Stan Tonneson, the driving force behind getting this funding possible. He worked with CRYA and WOOO to help get public support to the Legislature. A big Thank You needs to go out to Stan for his work. It is described here:
Our legislation to get funding for the removal of abandoned and derelict boats took many twists and turns this year. Our original bill SB740 which added a $5 fee to all boat registrations did not move out of committee as the Senators did not feel it was equitable charging all boats in the state for a regional issue. Senator Taylor of District 21, SE Portland and including the Willamette from the falls to Downtown Portland introduced her similar bill, SB 840, which would have allowed each county of the state to create and manage their own ADV program and charge each boat up to about $6 a foot. Our groups spoke loud and clear against the added bureaucracy since we already had a functioning program at the OSMB that we were already paying for. Senator Taylor withdrew SB840 based on our input and introduced SB 859 which was a really simple bill that increased the amount of money that the OSMB can provide into their budget for the ADV account from $150,000 to 1 million per biennium. In addition, Senator Taylor vowed to find 1 million dollars to put into the program. SB 859 did pass the Senate but sat in the legislature rules committee and did not pass.
Senator Taylor worked on getting some of the federal 1.9 Trillion dollars from the ARPA fund and succeeded to get her promised $1 million dollars to kick start the clean up of ADV's and to work on a program and future legislation with more effective programs and permanent funding.
A big shout out and thank you to Senator Taylor.
The OSMB will be in charge of the money and yes they can take and use this money. There are a lot of details, guidelines and requirements and this will take a while for OSMB to figure out. It is hopeful that some of the money can be spent on the Columbia River in Multnomah County. Very soon Ross Island is going to do a major clean up on their own dime. Of the 60 or so boats around their island, many will move to other areas but they will be successful in having a major impact.
Lots of good news.
Thanks for everyone's support and advocacy during this 2021 legislative session. We may try for a bill in the 2022 short session but most likely we will wait for the long session in 2023 giving us plenty of time to work on better programs.
Stan Tonneson
Rocky Pointe Marina
