The Senate Democrats' agenda includes growing jobs in rural Oregon, especially in farming and timber communities.

Sen. Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay, spoke on Tuesday morning with a contingent of senators who announced the agenda. He stressed the importance of better funding for education, but he also spoke to his role as the chair of the new Senate Committee on Rural Communities and Economic Development.

“We’re going to try and bring these economies back,” he said.

Roblan said the committee will work on bills that help boost small businesses in rural Oregon and that help balance environmentalists’ concerns with the logging industry. Timber harvesting can be done in a sustainable way now, much more so than in the past, and he said it needs to start happening. The goal is to return these communities to the economic robustness they experienced in the 1960s and 1970s, he said.

Read more at The Statesman Journal.