Peter Courtney, longtime Senate leader, dies at 81

Tributes are being paid by nearly every top official in Oregon to Peter Courtney, the longest serving state legislator and Senate president.

Courtney died Tuesday, July 16, of complications stemming from cancer, according to an announcement by Gov. Tina Kotek. He had surgery to replace an aortic valve six months ago after he had been diagnosed in 2023 with congestive heart failure. He had already had a kidney removed in 2021 as a result of urethral cancer. He was 81.

Last year, the Democrat from Salem concluded a record 38 years in the Legislature — 14 in the House and 24 in the Senate — and a record 20 years as Senate president. (The modern record for Oregon Senate service is 29 years, and the overall record just shy of 32 years.)

Courtney was known for his outsized personality and his knack for compelling oratory — a lost art in a political world driven by sound bites — but also achievements for Salem and Oregon.

Among them: A reconstructed Oregon State Hospital, whose founding dates to 1883, and a focus on mental health without its stigma. Also a renovated Capitol — due for substantial completion next year — and Oregon’s transition to annual sessions of the Legislature.

“I want to recognize President Courtney for being one of the most important architects of our state in recent memory,” said Kotek, who worked with and also tussled with him while she was speaker of the Oregon House from 2013 until she resigned in 2022 to run for governor.

“At his core, Peter believed that we need to take care of each other, live with compassion for our neighbors, and get big things done together. These Oregon values will live on in his name.”

Along with the House speaker, the Senate president names members and leaders of committees — where the Oregon Legislature does its real work — and assigns the bills to them.

State hospital and mental health

On the very day of Courtney’s death, Kotek led a ceremony to dedicate the rebuilt Oregon State Hospital in Salem and its 620 beds in honor of Courtney, who was behind the effort that concluded in 2013. The project cost more than $300 million, but it came in under budget. A 174-bed satellite hospital was opened in Junction City in 2014.

The Salem hospital was the setting for the 1975 Academy Award-winning film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

In December 2022, a month before he left public office, Courtney recalled that the impetus for the reconstruction came from a tour that he and then-House Speaker Karen Minnis, a Republican, took in 2004. They saw a dusty shed housing about 3,500 copper urns, a “room of forgotten souls” and stained pages with the numbers and names of people who died there but whose cremains had never been claimed. They also saw patients cowering in the halls and large fire hoses.

“They were not there for cleaning; I will leave it at that,” he said.

The next day, when they met again, “I said we’ve got to have a new state hospital, she said I was right — and we didn’t care how much it cost.”

But Courtney also said hospital beds must go hand in hand with community providers of mental health for children and adults. He did win legislative approval in 2013 of higher tobacco taxes to pay for children’s programs, and in 2021, legislators boosted funding to community providers by $1 billion.

“Everybody says they want to deal with mental health — just not today,” he said in the 2022 interview. “There’s always something else. I have seen it over and over again. That is why we are still struggling and not moved ahead on this.”

Capitol and Legislature

He also became a champion of the physical reconstruction of the Capitol, which itself arose from the 1935 fire that destroyed the previous building, to strengthen it against a subduction-zone earthquake off the Oregon coast.

Courtney said a 1993 earthquake at magnitude 5.6 was a wake-up call for the Capitol, which sustained damage to the rotunda and closed it to the public until mid-1995. Minimal repairs were made then for $4 million.

“I always worried about it because of the children in the building,” he said. “People could die by the hundreds and you would not find them for days.”

The project was estimated to cost $250 million in 2015 when Courtney thought he had lined up the votes — but then-House Speaker Kotek voted against it along with some of her colleagues. The work continued in phases, and in January 2022 — after Kotek resigned to run for governor — lawmakers approved funding for a project that now is estimated at $500 million.

Some of the higher costs, though, resulted from changes that lawmakers themselves requested to minimize construction disruptions during sessions. Under Courtney’s original plan, the entire Capitol complex would have been vacated for three years, two of them in election years. Most work is now scheduled for completion in the first half of 2025.

Courtney’s other contribution to reshaping the Legislature was a shift to annual sessions, but not until lawmakers tested the idea in 2008 and 2010. Voters approved a ballot measure in 2010 to set odd-numbered-year sessions at 160 days and even-numbered-year sessions at 35 days. Only Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas have their lawmakers meet every other year.

The measure passed with a two-thirds majority. Courtney said Oregon lawmakers could no longer do the state’s business in an unlimited session every other year, and a select few lawmakers making budget decisions the rest of the time.

“I was surprised by how overwhelmingly the public said yes to it,” Courtney said in 2022. “But Oregon had to get there.”

His earlier years

Courtney was born June 18, 1943, in Philadelphia. He grew up in West Virginia, where he played football and graduated from high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s in public administration in 1966, both from the University of Rhode Island, and his law degree in 1969 from Boston University.

He came to Oregon in 1969 to be a law clerk for Judge William Fort of the new Court of Appeals. He stayed at the YMCA in downtown Salem for two years. The YMCA has been rebuilt — in part because Courtney helped secure funding for it in 2017 — but a three-story building across the street that houses veterans is named Courtney Place.

A bridge in city-owned Minto-Brown Island Park is named after him.

He was elected to the Salem City Council in 1974 and also was on the Salem Area Mass Transit Board. He was elected to the Oregon House in 1980, but after two terms, he lost a Democratic primary bid for Oregon’s 5th District seat in the U.S. House in 1984. He lost his first bid for the Oregon Senate in 1986.

He won his old seat in the Oregon House in 1988, and two years later, he became Democratic leader just as the majority in that chamber shifted to Republicans. He was leader until after the 1997 session, when he resigned to run successfully for the Senate in 1998.

During his years in the Legislature prior to the Senate presidency — and even afterward — Courtney was a champion of children, sports and animals, the latter earning him a “Top Dog” designation by the Oregon Humane Society in 2011. He also was the chief sponsor of physical education requirements in schools (2007) and legal protection of student athletes’ name, image and likeness (2021 and 2022).

Courtney was nearly forced out of the Legislature by term limits, but the Oregon Supreme Court tossed the limits out in early 2002 — and Courtney won re-election to the Senate. But he nearly died after surgery for a burst appendix.

He was thrust into the presidency of an evenly divided Senate in January 2003, when some Republicans — who had lost their majority — balked at giving the job to then-Democratic Leader Kate Brown. (It launched Brown into victories for secretary of state in 2008 and 2012, and she succeeded to the governorship when John Kitzhaber resigned amid an ethics scandal in 2015 just 38 days into his fourth term.)

Courtney taught at Western Oregon University, and he was also assistant to the president, boosting his earnings from the Senate presidency. (The presiding officers in each chamber are paid twice what lawmakers earn monthly.)

For years, Courtney ran a leg of the Hood-to-Coast Relay as a member of the Wolves, named in honor of the university mascot.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing politically. Courtney took a 10-day break in 2019 after critics, including some of his Democratic colleagues, said he had been too slow to respond to allegations of sexual harassment in the Capitol and should quit. One of them, Democrat Shemia Fagan, even voted against him for the presidency. But none of the Senate’s other Democratic leaders joined them.

Courtney is survived by his wife, Margie Brenden; they married in 1976. They have three grown sons, Sean, Peter and Adam. A mass is planned at St. Mary Catholic Church in Mount Angel.

pwong@pamplinmedia.com