On April 9 in the House Committee on Veterans and Emergency Preparedness, officials from the Oregon Military Department made a remarkable admission.
Agency officials disclosed they'd been making excessive pension payments to firefighters for three decades—and now they wanted the law changed to make their mistake disappear.
"We are retroactively trying to take care of these firefighters," OMD Deputy Director David Stuckey testified. Marjorie Taylor, a senior policy analyst for the Public Employees Retirement System told lawmakers the agency's request was "rather unusual."
That was an understatement.
Facing the April 9 deadline for bills to move out the chambers in which they originated, the Veterans Committee held a public hearing and work session on House Bill 2196 which, as first introduced, was about as vanilla as a bill gets.