Law Making 101

Freshman representative learns the ropes in the Oregon Legislature
Rep. Mark Johnson has held office for less than a month, but the Republican from Hood River already has reached one important conclusion.
“In this business, it doesn’t do much good to be way off in the fringe when it comes to policy development,” said Johnson, who represents District 52, encompassing Sandy, Boring and the mountain villages.
As a freshman legislator, Johnson has a full plate of leadership roles including his position as co-chairman of the House Agriculture and Natural Resources committee and the House Higher Education subcommittee.
He also serves as member of the Business and Labor committee and continues to serve at his home as a member of the Hood River County School Board.
With barely enough time to exhale, Johnson is still getting up to speed on his duties as a state policy maker amid the first-ever even split between Democrats and Republicans in Oregon’s House of Representatives.
“The biggest adjustment so far is the mental capacity it takes to keep up with what’s going on,” Johnson said on Feb. 16 from his office in Salem. “What you are required to do in this job is engage and disengage in different policy discussions as many as three or four times an hour. That’s the challenge. You have to do mental gymnastics in a short period of time.”
To read more….

By Gus Jarvis
The Sandy Post, Feb 22, 2011, Updated Feb 22, 2011

Tags: Boring, Hood River, Mark Johnson, Mountain Villages, Oregon Legislature, Sandy

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 1:58 pm and is filed under City of Sandy, Clackamas County, Informational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.