UPDATE: On June 30, lawmakers reversed themselves and sent the bill back to committee for additional work.

More than a year after a train derailed, caught fire and spilled oil into the Columbia River in Mosier, state lawmakers are on the verge of forcing railroads to develop plans for making Oregonians safer the next time.

With a big catch: Those plans will be secret.

Unlike in California and Washington, any railroad response plan for oil spills in Oregon would be exempt from disclosure under the state's open records law.

The bill by Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, a Portland Democrat, also would not allow lawyers to subpoena the plans after an accident to see if the railroad acted negligently.

The secrecy provisions in House Bill 2131 are yet another concession to industry during a legislative session in which state lawmakers have made the environment a low priority. Policymakers refused to fund Gov. Kate Brown's toxic air cleanup initiative, gutted a bill to crack down on cancer-causing diesel soot and didn't advance legislation to address the overpumping of Oregon's aquifers.

The bill, which passed out of the Legislature's Ways and Means committee Wednesday by a 22-1 vote, cannot be amended before votes in the full House and Senate.

A spokesman for Gov. Kate Brown said the governor's attorney needs to review the bill before Brown decides whether or not she will sign it.

Railroads have consistently tried to keep information about oil train routes and readiness secret, arguing that it would endanger national security to tell the public where the easily identifiable, mile-long trains move. The federal government and Oregon officials have repeatedly rejected that argument.

Kristen South, a Union Pacific spokeswoman, didn't address a question about the secrecy provisions in Smith Warner's bill. South said her company worked closely with Oregon leaders to draft the bill.

Union Pacific, which hauled the oil tankers that derailed last June in Mosier, is "committed to enhancing the safe rail movement of products railroads are required to move for customers," South said.

It's the second time that Smith Warner, a Portland Democrat who's raised $2,500 from railroads since 2014, tried to improve oil train safety before making major concessions that other West Coast leaders did not. She continued to support her 2015 bill that would've increased fees on railroads to fund readiness, even though the finished product was stripped of the fees and other main provisions.

She did not respond to a call.

In 2015, Washington adopted a law that is far more transparent. It was championed by Republican Sen. Doug Ericksen, a Trump political appointee backed by the oil and railroad industries. The only details kept secret in Washington's spill plans are personal cell phone numbers, said Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, oil spill preparedness manager for the Washington Department of Ecology.

"The rest of it is an open book," she said.

Oregon oil train corridors

In Washington, railroads must provide extensive details on how they will respond to spills large and small: who will be involved; how first responders will be notified; where containment equipment is stored; how the public will be protected; how air pollution from the vapors or burning oil will be monitored.

And the public can read and comment on the plans. Pilkey-Jarvis said the public's involvement makes the spill plans more effective.

"Community input definitely can make a difference in a plan and the level of preparedness," she said.

In Oregon, the public would be left in the dark.

Environmental groups and trial lawyers say that approach is a bad idea.

"What the Legislature and the leadership and Barbara Smith Warner are doing is passing a bill that protects the railroads from being responsible for the accidents, damage and personal injury they cause," said Michael Lang, conservation director for Friends of the Columbia Gorge. "We put our trust in the bill's sponsors, and instead they turned their backs on the public and gave the railroads what they wanted."

The Oregon Trial Lawyers Association said the exemptions would leave the public without any way of comparing the actions a railroad undertakes during a disaster with the steps it pledged to follow.

"In the next catastrophe, if people are seriously injured or die because of the negligence of the railroad, they should have access to information they need to prove the wrongdoing," association representatives Arthur Towers and Paul Bovarnick said in testimony submitted to lawmakers.

Oregon has huge gaps in readiness for an oil train disaster. The state already has response plans for the Columbia River and the lower Deschutes, but not for hundreds of miles of inland railways, including on the Willamette and upper Deschutes rivers. The bill would give the Department of Environmental Quality $600,000 to expand those plans, which aim to keep oil away from sensitive habitat and other important environmental resources.

The plans required of railroads would go farther and be more detailed.

— Rob Davis

rdavis@oregonian.com

503.294.7657;