A long, tough session.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed the Legislature's bill for an $800 million tax increase Wednesday, paving the way for the adjournment of the longest session in history. The 72nd Legislative Assembly, however, deserves to be remembered for more than its length.

Lawmakers faced challenges of unprecedented difficulty, under political circumstances that were a recipe for constant conflict. Yet the Legislature can point to significant achievements.

Kulongoski was right to resist the temptation to prolong a showdown with the House of Representatives over his signing of the tax increase bill. Had the Legislature adjourned, the governor would have had 30 days to sign the bill - and those days would have been subtracted from the 90 days that opponents will have to gather signatures on petitions referring the legislation to a public vote. The Senate adjourned Tuesday, but the House remained in session, leaving the governor only five days to sign the tax increase into law.

Even if Kulongoski had succeeded in outwaiting the House and gaining the opportunity to delay the bill-signing, opponents are likely to collect the 50,000 signatures they need for a referral. The governor's tactics would have been accurately portrayed as a stalling tactic designed to deny Oregonians a chance to vote on the tax increase. By signing the bill Wednesday, Kulongoski avoided being labeled an obstructionist while freeing himself and others to debate the tax increase on its merits.

The bill's merits are the merits of necessity. Bipartisan supermajorities in both the House and the Senate supported the tax increase - a three-year income tax surcharge - because they could not in good conscience accept the alternatives: more borrowing, or further budget cuts. Including the tax increase, the final budget for 2003-05 is $11.6 billion, down from $12 billion in the previous biennium. The state's anticipated revenues for the current budget period declined by more than the amount of the tax increase during the course of the Legislature's torturous session.

The budget is a triumph of pragmatism over ideology. Republicans, who control the House by a 34-25 margin with one vacancy, were disinclined to favor any increase in taxes. Democrats, who share control of a Senate that is divided 15-15 between the two parties, were unwilling to cut state programs as deeply as would be needed if no new revenues were available. Kulongoski, who had initially proposed a budget with no new taxes, recognized that the continuing slide in state revenues left him no responsible choice but to change his position.

Given these seemingly irreconcilable political positions, crafting the budget would not have been possible without painful compromises. There were just enough lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle who were willing to make them.

The 2003 Legislature did more than agree on a budget. It also approved far-reaching reforms of the Public Employee Retirement System, which had a projected shortfall of $16 billion when the session began. It also approved a $2.5 billion plan for repairing bridges and roads throughout the state, the most significant transportation funding bill to emerge from Salem in a decade. Neither of these achievements was easy, but both were essential to the economic well-being of the state.

Important work remains to be done. The state's tax system, whose glaring deficiencies have been exposed in the current economic downturn, still needs to be reformed. Legislators should also take this session's record length as evidence of the need to move toward shorter annual sessions for budgeting purposes.

Members of the 72nd Legislative Assembly can't be proud of having stayed in Salem longer than any of their predecessors. But length is only one way to measure a legislative session. By other, more meaningful, measures, the 2003 Legislature tackled bigger and thornier problems than any that came before. Lawmakers are leaving Oregon better at the end of the session than it was when they convened 7 1/2 long months ago.