Walden announces district town halls

Walden has held 148 town hall meetings since 2012, and responded to more than 168,000 letters, emails, and phone calls in the last two years, he said.

While announcing the town halls Walden also released a list of accomplishments, which included responding to more than 168,400 messages and assisting 2,387 Oregonians from his district, including 1,037 veterans and their families, with federal casework in the past two years.

The representative also listed the legislative accomplishments he thought most important for Oregon.

Topping that list is his legislation to combat the opioid crisis, which passed the House (393-8) Senate (981-1) in a sweeping bipartisan vote and was signed into law in October 2018. “This legislation provides new tools to those on the front lines of the opioid epidemic in Oregon and across the country,” Walden said. He worked to secure grant funding for local communities, and completed thorough investigations into the “bad actors” contributing to the spread of the crisis, he added.

Second in the list is federal forest policy reform. That includes a fix to so-called fire borrowing, which will end the vicious cycle of robbing from forest management accounts to pay for fighting wildfires, Walden said, and he will continue to work to bring active management back to Oregon forests to help reduce fire risk in the future.

Third is legislation to implement medical assistants, or scribes, into the VA system. “This will allow physicians to focus on the patient and scribes to focus on the paperwork,” Walden said. In the private sector, studies show that this results in a 59 percent increase in the number of patients a doctor can see per hour, he explained.

Walden said he also helped secure rural schools funding, drought relief for Klamath Basin irrigators, reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and more funding for community health centers.

The Drinking Water System Improvement Act, designed to help communities modernize their water infrastructure with a revolving loan fund program, was signed into law under his leadership, he said, as well as another water-related law designed to help get hydropower projects to market faster and remove barriers to investment.

Walden said he helped pass the first reauthorization of the Federal Communications Commission in decades, which he said will help boost development of next-generation wireless broadband and will improve the FCC’s ability to expand broadband infrastructure in rural America.

Walden said he led the effort to reauthorize the federal Brownsfields Program, which is being used throughout Oregon, including in The Dalles, to put contaminated industrial sites back into active use.