Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, speaks on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. She is the lead author of a bill that the Senate passed again on Wednesday that would expand rights for foster youth in the state. (Ron Cooper/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

The bill’s author said she had never heard from the governor about the bill prior to her Tuesday veto.

Oregon senators rebuked Gov. Tina Kotek on Wednesday, voting overwhelmingly to override her veto of a bill that would strengthen and expand protections for Oregon’s foster youth.

Lawmakers voted 21-6 to repass Senate Bill 875 after the chamber learned of Kotek’s veto, in which she said the policy exemplifies “the risk of fragmented policymaking in this area.”

The governor’s perspective holds particular sway over the area of foster care investigations, with the office of the Children’s Advocate housed in a governor advocacy office within the Oregon Department of Human Services.

The issue of foster youth and care has been a contentious issue for Kotek, who unsuccessfully sought to push the Legislature this session to enact another bill lowering regulations around the transfer and seclusion of children in residential care and treatment centers.

Senate Bill 875, meanwhile, would require a court order for blocking or limiting contact among foster children and their siblings. The measure also lists out several rights for foster kids, including being assigned an attorney, maintaining access to personal belongings like toys and being given appropriate luggage to carry their belongings.

The bill’s lead author, Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis, took to the floor minutes after legislative staff announced the veto to contest Kotek’s points and argue for the bill’s urgency.

“We really want to do everything we can to just prevent moving kids from their families, and we want to keep them up together,” she told her colleagues. “Our current law says that that right exists as long as it’s appropriate, but it doesn’t say who makes that determination, and it doesn’t really provide the youth who will be understanding why they are being denied that access.”

The bill would also expand the definition of a child in care to include any child under custody of Oregon’s Department of Human Services, encompassing children who live with parents during in-home safety plans or reunifications upon a trial. Kotek, however, saw that as ripe for misunderstanding.

“This means the law would expand the child abuse investigation framework for specialized child caring agencies to parents’ homes,” she wrote Tuesday. “It also shifts the standard from the type of placement to the legal status of the child without clarifying who is considered a perpetrator under the law.”

Gelser Blouin, however, pushed back on Kotek’s veto as a last-minute decision that sought no input from the bill’s supporters. While the human services department wrote to the Legislature with questions and concerns about the legislation’s language, she said Kotek’s veto was “a surprise.”

“We made adjustments to the bill. It has bipartisan sponsorship,” she said Wednesday. “It passed both chambers with more than the two-thirds threshold, and at no point prior to that were the issues in this letter ever brought up to me by the governor’s office.”

The problem of child abuse and neglect in Oregon’s foster care system has long been on the mind of foster youth advocates and state officials, with a 2024 oversight report from a Kotek-appointed watchdog finding that cases involving child welfare complaints were the most common type of case dealt with by the Oregon Department of Human Services.

In 2023, Oregon’s foster care system held custody of 7,282 children for at least one day in various facility placements such as family homes, professional treatment programs, psychiatric residential treatment, preadoptive homes, developmental disability-accomodative homes, or independent living, according to the state’s most recent data published in October 2024.

The bill was also amended in committee amid concerns over a provision that would also allow foster children the ability to decline to attend or participate in religious activities, which some conservative lawmakers feared would restrict families who are religious from adopting and fostering kids.

The only lawmaker who spoke out against overriding the veto, Sen. Mark Meek, D-Gladstone, said he had questions about how the bill of rights would be provided to younger children who don’t know how to read. He was wary of going against Kotek’s wishes, pointing to an ongoing workgroup passed by lawmakers last year that is studying legal concerns over the definitions of victims, perpetrators and abuse involving children.

“I’m very concerned about overriding what the governor’s recommendations are, and we are the body in which we produce these laws, produce these bills of writing,” he warned his colleagues. “We have a chance to step back, take into consideration the governor’s concerns, or maybe dig into those policies and see how we can fix them.”

Another bill sponsor, Sen. Cedric Hayden, R-Falls Creek, urged lawmakers to get all of the Legislature’s current work supporting foster youth “over the finish line.” On Wednesday, he shared with his colleagues his own personal experiences struggling to work with the human services department while seeking custody for two children that were once abandoned with him.

“Because of the unfortunate circumstances of these children’s early lives, the state is the de facto parent for these children,” he said in a statement following the vote. “That means it’s our job to provide them a safe, secure home, health care, and an education. It means we cannot stand for them to be abused.”

In order to be passed, the bill would still need to clear the House with a two-thirds majority vote. In her Tuesday veto, Kotek also blocked Senate Bill 736, which would have enhanced communication between law enforcement, the human services department, and parents and guardians undergoing child abuse investigations. The Senate voted 18-9 to retain that bill in the chamber with no further official action.