An Interview with State Representative David Gomberg

By Brian Bahouth

Ahead of the five-week interim legislative session that begins on February 2, 2026, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, Oregon state lawmakers convened a wide range of informational committee meetings in Salem. 

On Wednesday, November 19, the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis issued a modestly positive economic forecast that showed better-than-expected corporate income tax and other revenue sources helping to reduce the projected deficit from roughly $375 million to $63 million, though the numbers remain in flux amid various revenue uncertainties. The next two-year budget will be based on the forecast to be released on February 4, 2026. 

Democrat David Gomberg represents District 10 in the Oregon House of Representatives, an area that includes Lincoln and western Benton and Lane Counties. This week, Representative Gomberg served on five committees in three days, including chairing the Joint Subcommittee On Transportation and Economic Development.  

I spoke with Rep. Gomberg by phone on Thursday morning, November 20. We discussed a variety of issues from the state budget to the impact of tariffs on the district to the latest news regarding a possible U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Lincoln County.

Q: This week was a flurry of informational meetings. Where does what happened this week fit into the bigger legislative picture? Best I can tell, lawmakers are getting a running start at the upcoming interim session early next year.

A: In a normal situation, we spend five months building a budget for Oregon. The [Oregon] constitution requires that it be a balanced budget, and we spend that five-month period to build a budget that’s supposed to last us for two years. 

But no sooner had we brought the gavel down to conclude the session in 2025 than things started to change. Most particularly, federal legislation that was changing the national tax code. Now, remember, Oregon doesn’t have a sales tax. We rely primarily on an income tax. And in order to do that, we then rely on the federal tax code to decide how much state income tax you pay. So when the federal government issues a number of changes in the tax code, they affect how much revenue we’re bringing in.

And our revenue office concluded, as they reviewed legislation from Washington, DC, that those changes were going to cost Oregon something in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. That’s a billion with a “B.”

Now there were other things going on as the economy was changing, and so we made the decision that we’ve got five months to build a two-year budget, and now, when we come back in 2026 for the legislative session, we’ve only got five weeks. 

So we decided to get an early start on that by asking state agencies to give us some recommendations on how they would reduce their budgets if in fact this trend continues, and they provided that to us last week, and then this week, budget committees began sitting down with a variety of different state agencies to review those recommendations, to ask questions, to try and start putting together a sense of what we would do in January if we have to make cuts in the budget that we approved last June.

Q: I watched the Ways and Means Subcommittee meeting you chaired, and you heard from several of the larger budget items in the state budget—the [Oregon] Housing and Community Services agency and Veterans Services come to mind. It was clear from the discussions that some difficult choices are ahead. 

A: All of the budget cuts are going to be tough. And you know, the first thing I would say to you is, while I chair the committee that deals with transportation and economic development, I am so grateful that I am not handling the committee that deals with education or health care or mental health or public safety. 

So yes, we sat down and we heard from four agencies. Look, in a normal budget process, we’d spend a week on each of those agencies. Instead, we had two and a half hours to go over four of them. 

So what you saw me doing is allocating a half an hour for each agency. They came in with a bunch of slides, a PowerPoint presentation. And I told them up front, ‘We got half an hour for your agency. I’m only going to give you 15 minutes for your slides.’ They’re all online. People can go to the legislative information system and review those slides. The committee members had already looked at them. I’m going to give you 15 minutes to give us an overview, and then we’re going to ask questions, and those questions, I think, really focus on some of the difficult choices that we’re going to have to make.

Because you heard agencies recommending that we cut programs that create jobs in Oregon and innovation and entrepreneurism, recommendations that we cut funding for our Small Business Development Center. In the Housing Department, they were saying we’re going to reduce funding for senior and disabled housing. 

And in the Veterans Affairs, they said, “We want to cut County Veterans Service Officers”—you know, the folks that local veterans reach out to  when they need and want help. 

And the Bureau of Labor and Industry said they’re going to cut positions for firefighter training. 

We pushed back on those choices. But the problem is, if we don’t cut those areas that they are recommending, then we’ve got to cut something else. And our questions are, what are? What’s next in line? What are our other alternatives? Give us some choices, rather than simply saying ”These are the places we’re going to make the cuts.” 

I mean, it would be all well and good to say, hey, here’s what the agency’s recommended, here’s what we’re going to do. But we’re saying, “No, wait a minute, we don’t want to cut senior housing and housing for disabled Oregonians. We don’t want to cut small business development centers, and we need all the firefighters we can find.

So yeah, we pushed back a little bit, and it was an interesting hearing. I’m not sure every committee chair did it the same way I did, but I wanted to make sure that rather than just sit back and listen to presentations from agencies, we actually asked them questions and talked about the hard choices that need to be made.

Q: Lawmakers got some good economic news this week. The forecast showed that better-than-expected corporate income tax and other revenue sources helped reduce the projected deficit. Is this a factor?

A: I’ll say that it could be a factor. Let me explain for your listeners. Revenue forecasts in Oregon—We have to pass a balanced budget, so we can only spend as much as we’re bringing in. And how do we know how much money we’re going to be bringing in as we build these budgets two years into the future? The answer is, we rely on the State Office of Economic Analysis and our state economists to give us projections, forecasts, or some people might say educated guesses, about what the economy is going to look like next year and the year after that. 

We get those reports on a quarterly basis, but we base our decisions on the last one that we get before we actually approve the budget. So we’re going to be basing our budget changes that we just finished discussing on the revenue forecast that we get in January. 

Meanwhile, we just got a forecast here in November, and it looked fairly encouraging. I call it the forecast forecast, and by that I mean it’s a forecast of what the forecast may look like in January, when we make our final decisions.

And yes, it looked better, and that’s encouraging news, but I need to quickly add that that forecast was based on incomplete data. And what’s going on is that the offices that we normally turn to to give us projections of how many people are working, how much money they’re making, how changes may be occurring, those people have been out of work for the last six weeks. Why? Because they work for the federal government. The federal government was shut down, so we were basing this most recent forecast on incomplete information, but the bottom line is this: I hope the economy gets better. I hope more people are working. I hope that Oregon’s economy and Oregon’s people are healthy. And if that’s the case, well then we won’t have to cut as deep as we’re talking about right now. 

But we’re still having these conversations, because we need to be prepared for the worst as we are hoping for the very best. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re looking at what the budgets will look like if we need to cut them. And you know, it’s a lot easier to come in in January and not cut as deep, but we need to be prepared in case we have to make those deep cuts. And we’re having those discussions and those debates and those negotiations right now.

Q: With the closure of the Rogue Brewery and all their restaurants, I saw that a representative from the Pelican Brewery spoke to lawmakers this week. Do you have concerns about the craft brewing business and the hospitality industry in the District?

A: Absolutely. The closure of Rogue Brewery is devastating. It’s an iconic Oregon institution based here on the coast, and when they closed their doors, 60 people found themselves out of work that afternoon. That’s devastating as well. And you got to ask, what’s going on? 

There’s a number of things going on. I mean, the first thing is, Oregonians are drinking less. They’re drinking less beer, they’re drinking less wine, they’re drinking less spirits. So that’s having an impact on the industry. The tariffs and the reaction to the tariffs are having a significant impact as well, because Canada.

Canada has basically stopped buying our beer and our alcohol and our wines, and that’s having a huge effect in our district, where we make craft spirits like Pelican and Beachcrest and up until this week, Rogue making wonderful beers. 

But our district also stretches all the way in the valley, over practically to Junction City, and we’ve got some of the best wineries in Oregon here too, and they’re struggling. 

So yeah, I’m very concerned about this industry and the changes that are occurring, not only in how much Oregonians and Americans purchase, but our ability to export that, because 20 percent of Rogue’s business was exports. Twenty percent of our winery exports make up their business as well. So that’s a great concern.

And then you asked about the hospitality industry. The hospitality industry is struggling because it’s a place where so many of our immigrant neighbors are working. And, you know, let’s be candid. Our immigrant neighbors are worried. They’re afraid. A lot of them are not coming to work, and they’re not coming to work because they’re concerned that somebody may be waiting there to detain them. 

And we had a situation here in Lincoln City this week where a man was called to work, and on his way to work, he was stopped, he was detained, and two hours later, he was out of state. 

And I’m being told that the ICE agents showed up at his house that night looking for his wife and his children, and they came in the middle of the night with masks and dogs and were pounding on the door. That’s the kind of environment we’ve got, so I’m not surprised that people are not showing up in the restaurants and in the hotels and the other places the immigrant community has been working, or our fish processing plants. 

I read that in Charlotte, North Carolina, that’s having similar kinds of challenges as we are here, that 30,000 school children didn’t go to school because they were concerned about what might be going on at home, and so they were keeping those kids back. 

Those kinds of decisions have consequences, and this is rippling through the immigrant community and our communities of color, because it’s not just people who are immigrants that are concerned about about the environment out there. And I’m reading and hearing plenty of stories. I know people who have been detained that are U.S. citizens and U.S.-born citizens that have been detained and it creates a very difficult environment in an industry where we rely on those people to make the beds, to bus the dishes, to serve and cook our food or to clean our fish.

Q: Is there anything else important about the last few days that I’m not asking you?

A: At the same time we’re in Salem talking about cutting budgets, here at home we’ve got major news coming from Rogue. That’s difficult. We’ve got a whale that washed ashore. That’s very sad news. And that poor creature eventually had to be euthanized because there wasn’t a way to get it back into the water and it was too damaged, too hurt to be able to survive if we did.

And then we’ve got the very complex and concerning possibility of a federal detention facility being based in Newport, Oregon, at the same location where they’ve taken our rescue helicopter away. That has certainly stirred concerns here on the coast, as you know with 800 people showing up at the city council meeting to express their concerns and their protests and their demand that the helicopter be brought back to save lives here. That’s 800 people in a town of 10,000.

I told people in Salem that story, and they gasped at the level of engagement that we have out here at the coast. And there was some news, positive news that the folks that were looking at a detention center in Newport had withdrawn their request from the city to lease space from the city at the airport. I don’t want to overreact to that news, because we’re hearing that those same people are now reaching out to private land owners looking for some alternatives because they don’t think the city wants to work with them. 

And we’re still seeing job postings. We’re still seeing requests for local businesses to provide water or haul away human waste. There’s a lot going on out here, and that story isn’t over either. So a very intense week with a lot of big questions stirring.

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