The Gilliam Court members want to change to a Board of Commissioners. The first step is to eliminate the judicial duties of the Judge. The Court passed Order (or if you prefer Resolution) 2023-01 on December 6th 2023, in their minds the action eliminated all the Judge’s judicial duties. In Order 2023-01, there are seven “Whereas”, which provide information used to justify the Order, it’s one those “Whereas” I want to comment on.
Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are Oregon State laws. The Court used ORS 111.115 in a “Whereas” to say it was in accordance with the state law. The ORS 111.115 “Transfer of estate proceeding from county court to circuit court” has 3 paragraphs,
(1) An estate proceeding may be transferred at any time from a County Court to the Circuit Court for the county by order of the County Court
(2) An estate proceeding … in which the county judge is a party… must be transferred….
(3) Upon transfer of an estate proceeding to circuit court …:
(a) (to summarize) the clerk must record it
(b) (to summarize) once in circuit court, estate proceeding stays in Circuit Court
Please focus on the word “an”. Dictionaries say “an” is a “Determiner”. A “Determiner” is a word that modifies, describes, or introduces a noun. Determiners can be used to clarify what a noun refers to and to indicate the quantity or number. The “an” means one, individual, or singular. It is very clear, the law says estate proceedings can be passed to circuit court individually. One at a time, and only estate proceedings.
The Court’s use of the ORS 111.115 in a “Whereas” said: “probate matters may be transferred at any time from a County Court to the Circuit Court for the county by order of the County Court”.
For the Court to use this verbiage to eliminate all the probate duties of the Judge, is quite a stretch. There is more to probate than “estate proceedings”, a whole lot more. The law says Gilliam County, along with 5 other Counties, have the privilege of performing their own probate jurisdiction.
Why was the word “an” not included in the County’s Order? Why hasn’t the Court, in what is now 6 meetings, corrected the error? Instead of fixing the error, members of the court chose to work on changing the law. Changing an ORS law requires the state legislature to change it. Our court members went to Salem to change a law, this law has 5 other counties in it, 4 of those counties knew nothing of the effort and were adamantly against it. An emergency tag was attached that stated upon passage this law takes effect immediately. This effort failed.
County Court, you have one more meeting to fix the error before the election filing deadline, I trust you’ll get it done.
—Steve Shaffer, Condon
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