Rep. Nelson’s Plans for His Future in the Oregon Legislature: Nurses, Labor, and Bringing Aquatic Center Back to North Portland

Rep. Travis Nelson was sworn in to finish former Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek’s term a half hour before the 2022 short session started. As Kotek pursues a run for governor, Nelson is running his own campaign to keep the seat next term.

The House’s 44th District is now represented by a registered nurse, the first LGBTQA+ Black member and currently the only Black man serving in that chamber. And Nelson, 43, has simultaneously carved a career as a union leader, currently serving as the vice president of the Oregon Nurses Association.

A Louisiana native, and the grandson of sharecroppers, Nelson spoke with The Skanner about bringing his experience in the ER and a focus on racial equity to his new seat. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Skanner News: Because you were sworn in on the first day of the session, you weren’t able to put forward any of your own bills. What legislation do you support?

Travis Nelson: There are a number of bills I am championing and have signed on in support of: first, House Bill 4003.

Our healthcare workforce is going to grow a lot in the future as our society continues to age. So many healthcare providers have left during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we need to be doing all that we can to retain and ensure that we’re recruiting the healthcare workers that we need for the future. Part of what this bill does is give nurses access to the Oregon Wellness Program that doctors’ and physicians’ assistants already have access to. So much of what nurses have had to deal with during the COVID-19 pandemic is the trauma associated with losing patient after patient after patient, and so it gives nurses some additional mental health resources.

There’s a lot, in my opinion, that we’ve got to do on staffing and ensuring that nurses have safe staffing ratios.

This bill does not do that, but I do think that’s something we’re going to have to tackle in the future. So many nurses have left the workforce because they’ve had to work 12-, 16-hour shifts in some cases, and with higher patient loads than they really should have had to.

Another bill that I’m very passionate about is HB 4052, the racism as a public health crisis bill. The main thing it will do is expand the mobile health unit program in Oregon. I’m a big believer that you can prevent a lot of illnesses by taking the healthcare to the people, instead of expecting the people to come to the healthcare. I’d love to see us get to the point where we have mobile health units that resemble something like a big RV that will go around the city and this district and park and let people know when they’re coming, so people can go and get some of their basic care, and maybe some low-cost medication.

Doing that would be an investment up front but I think it would save us so much money in the end by identifying health issues and making it easy for people to get those early screenings that can be so important when it comes to saving people’s lives.

Another bill that’s important to House District 44 is SB 1567 (addressing) the fuel source tanks that are on the Willamette River near and around the St. Johns bridge. In a catastrophic earthquake, there would be – I don’t think I’m misstating – millions of gallons of fuel that could ignite and or spill into the river. This bill would go a long way to ensuring those fuel tanks are seismically stable.

I also support the Farmworker Overtime Bill, which is proving to be more controversial than I thought it would be. Farmworkers? Overtime? That should be a no-brainer. There are a lot of farmers that are doing the right thing, but there’s a significant amount of farmers in the state who are saying they can’t afford to pay their workers overtime. I think in the year 2022, overtime for people doing that kind of work, it’s just the right thing to do. We know farmworkers were left out of the Fair Labors Standard Act (of 1938) back in the day because it was the Jim Crow era, and the people who were doing the work back then, many of them were Black. It’s about time that we fix that here in Oregon. California and Washington already have laws in the books related to farm worker overtime, and Oregon needs to do the same.

TSN: You also have a more local priority, correct?

TN: I put in a $33 million budget request for the new aquatic center. I’ve been part of the effort to save Columbia Pool for a couple of years now, and the city has made it clear that they don’t want to spend the $10 million it would take to repair the Columbia Pool, only to have to build a new pool in the not-too-distant future. They currently have, though, over $16 million set aside for a new aquatic center, which Nick Fish wanted to realize before he unfortunately passed away while in office. But we need to bridge the gap with the other $33 million, so I’ve gone to the state and asked for that money. I’d love to see community partners and partners such as Nike and Adidas perhaps step in to fill some of those gaps.

We’ve got seniors who depended on that pool for exercise.

Young people stayed out of trouble, we kept kids off the street with that pool.

If we’re concerned about gang violence and we’re concerned about kids being out there without a whole lot to do, I think it just makes sense to provide swim programs at the pool that will teach them how to swim and keep them from drowning, but also keep them off the streets. Childcare would also be offered at this new aquatic center.

North Portland just should not be without aquatic services. It’s one of the most neglected areas of the city. Columbia Pool was here for nearly a hundred years. We’ve got to do right by the citizens of this district. There’s too many benefits to doing this to list.

TSN: What inspired you to become a nurse?

TN: That’s kind of a funny story. Originally, when I graduated from high school, I graduated with about a 2.4 gpa. I was originally going to go to Washington State University, and quickly decided that I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to work jobs like my dad did to make ends meet and live a middle-class life. I went on to become a janitor and do landscaping and work in restaurants, and I learned that I wanted to go back to school after doing that work for a couple years. After talking with my mom, who had been a CNA and a medical aid, she strongly encouraged me to go into nursing. And it was the best thing I ever did.

Nursing school is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I worked full-time while doing it, eight hours a day, with about another eight to 10 hours a day of schooling every day except weekends, and there was even some weekend work. It was hard. But when I graduated, within seven months of graduating I was working on a medical surgical unit, and I went on to work in the ER, I did some cardiovascular ICU work for a while, I was the head nurse on an inpatient rehab unit, I did case management, and then I got more involved in the professional association union side.

What I have loved about it is there are so many different careers within nursing, and being a nurse makes you qualified to do so many things. I know nurses who are nurse consultants, and they work in the legal realm. I know school nurses. Think of an area, and there’s a place for nurses there.

TSN: How did you become involved in labor organizing?

TN: My dad was a lifelong teamster, and he actually retired before the age of 60 on the teamster’s pension. When I was a kid, I remember him being in the union, and that was my first real exposure to unions. I became a nurse in 2005, when I was 27, and when I got a job at the hospital they were taking out union dues. So I showed up to a union meeting because I wanted to know where my union dues were going. I wasn’t anti-union, I just wanted to know what the union was about. At that meeting they were recruiting for the contract bargaining team, and I was young, I didn’t have a whole lot of obligations other than work, so I volunteered to do that. And I bargained my first contract, and then I was recruited to actually run to be co-chair of the local. I said sure, why not? Anything to help. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I ended up being elected, the first African American and I think at that time the youngest person to ever co-chair the local. After that, I did on-the-job training, and things have taken off from there.

TSN: Although union membership remains relatively low, there have been some high-profile, unexpected successes in organizing recently – for example, the newly formed Starbucks Workers United reported this week that 103 Starbucks stores in the U.S. have filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board after a location in Buffalo, N.Y. became the first to unionize late last year. As a labor organizer, would you agree that unions appear to be gaining steam again?

TN: I agree. Unions were definitely down in the 90s, early 2000s. I recall a lot of people said ‘Why do we even need unions anymore?’ And I think now that we’re in a place where CEO pay is outrageous, where wages have stagnated if not slashed, especially after the Great Recession, and seeing where corporate profits are and how corporations aren’t always transparent with their employees, I think people once again see unions as a great avenue for advocating for their hours, wages and working conditions.

If I recall, union approval is higher than it’s been in 50 years right now, because people see the power of coming together to bargain collectively. (According to a September 2021 Gallup poll, 68% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest rating since 1965.)

When it comes to women workers, unions are really great because there’s wage transparency there.

Generally with a union there’s a wage scale. Everybody knows how and where they slot in, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, you know where you should be on the wage scale. I think the latest numbers I’ve seen have shown that women in unions make about 22% more in comparable jobs that are non-union. (According to the National Women’s Law Center, that number is now closer to 24%.)

TSN: When did you decide to pursue elected office at the state level?

TN: I’ve been behind the scenes for many, many years. In 2016 I was a delegate for Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. I’m a former chair of the Democratic Party of Oregon’s Black Caucus. I have been one of 43 elected representatives to the Democratic National Committee for five years now. So I’ve been involved in party politics and the behind-the-scenes work, I’ve helped a lot of folks get elected over the years, but I hadn’t really given running for office myself a whole lot of thought until probably a year-and-a-half ago when I did the Oregon Labor Candidate School program, and then Tina Kotek announced that she was going to be running for governor at the end of last year, and I decided to make the leap at that point.

Even before I thought of running for office, in 2020, as an officer of the Democratic Party of Oregon, I helped champion and mostly wrote two resolutions, one demanding justice for George Floyd, and another one to call on the Democratic Party of Oregon to say that Black Lives Matter. Fortunately, after a lot of hard work and tough conversations, we were able to push the Democratic Party of Oregon to adopt both of those resolutions.