State senator says she was honor-bound to ignore her constituents

Lisa Reynolds on why she blocked needle-distribution regulation

Senators Lisa Reynolds (left) and Christine Drazan.

State Sen. Lisa Reynolds has a new explanation for why she mischaracterized the position of neighborhood activists seeking limits on distribution of drug paraphernalia: She didn’t think she was supposed to talk to them.

Reynolds killed Senate Bill 1573 in her committee in February, claiming that its proponents refused to compromise to aid its passage. Members of Stadiumhood Neighbors and Friends of Couch Park insisted that they would have accepted any reasonable revisions had they been given the opportunity.

Reynolds said she did not connect directly with her constituents out respect for Sen. Christine Drazan, the chief sponsor of the bill.

“We had what I thought was a really fruitful compromise,” Reynolds said, “and I’m hearing now the community would have approved, but that was not the message I got from the senator.

“I think maybe Sen. Drazan put words in their mouth,” she continued. “Maybe it was wrong of me to believe her. Obviously it was, but I’m not really sure it was my place to then go behind Sen. Drazan’s back on her bill, you know what I mean?

“We kind of don’t do that on each other’s bills—it’s like, this is her bill. It’s Sen. Drazan’s job to work that bill.”

Despite this deferential attitude toward Drazan, the Republican nominee to unseat Gov. Tina Kotek, Reynolds had little good to say about her senate colleague in a call to the NW Examiner.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying all this, but she played us all like a fiddle,” Reynolds added, “including the community.”

Sen. Drazan had a very different take on what happened.

She scoffed at the idea that Reynolds was upholding legislative protocol forbidding lawmakers from “going behind the back” of a bill’s sponsors to hear what their own constituents want.

“I’m not aware of any such tradition,” Drazan said. “But let’s parse this out: Why would her constituents reach out to anyone if she was talking to them? The thing that’s outside the norm is their feeling that they had no option.”

It was the third straight year Drazan had sponsored a bill regulating syringe distribution on behalf of Stadiumhood Neighbors. She also had a Democratic co-sponsor, though every Democrat voted against an effort to override Reynolds’ refusal to bring the bill to a floor vote in February.

Was it an extraordinary overreach into a local issue beyond her senate district? Drazan sees it as an extraordinary lapse by Democrats who should have paying attention to their own backyards.

“There’s no universe where I should have been the chief sponsor for her constituents,” said the senator from Canby.

As for the claim that neighbors insisted that no amendments be considered, Drazan said she has text messages proving the opposite.

“The only interest they had was seeing that the bill not die,” she said.

Michelle Milla, chair of Stadiumhood Neighbors, said her group sought help from city, county and state officials in response to weekly needle and pipe distributions by an anarchist group known as Portland People’s Outreach Project. Neighbors invited public officials to tour the district and see spillover problems in surrounding blocks.

The only state legislator who would take the tour or take up the cause was Drazan, while Reynolds showed no interest, Milla said.

The issue touched a higher priority for Reynolds: preserving the “harm reduction” approach to drug addiction. She claimed earlier versions of the legislation banning mobile needle handouts within 2,000 feet of schools and giving citizens a private right to sue violators “would have done away with harm reduction,” which she considers a medically proven and useful practice.

Reynolds now supports a county-run registration system for harm reduction supplies. She calls PPOP a “bad actor” that she hopes would be restrained by such regulation. She also vows to introduce a new bill in the 2027 legislative session.