Oregon Department of Agriculture outlines $15M IT modernization and flags federal funding uncertainty during budget hearing

The Joint Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Natural Resources continued an informational hearing March 25 on Senate Bill 5502 and Senate Bill 5503, hearing a multi-division presentation from the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) that emphasized an IT modernization package and uncertainty in federal funding.

The agency’s chief information officer, Ryan Schluntz, described Project 1 ODA and related policy option package POP 120 as the cornerstone of the agency’s technology plan. Schluntz said the package would fund a move away from aging, heavily customized systems to a cloud-first, managed-services approach and help bring ODA into closer alignment with state technology services. “We consume it like electricity,” Schluntz said, explaining that a managed-cloud approach lets the agency scale infrastructure up and down as needed.

Why it matters: ODA staff said legacy systems and manual, paper-based processes limit day-to-day operations for labs, inspections and business systems. The agency characterized POP 120 as a multi-million-dollar foundational investment; the presentation referenced roughly $15,000,000 in project and issuance costs tied to the package and accompanying debt service.

ODA officials said some modernization work is already underway: network infrastructure was migrated to the state’s EIS managed service and an initial cloud migration has started. Schluntz said ODA has begun hiring IT staff to implement and sustain the changes and has set measurable service-level standards.

At the same time, Deputy Director Jonathan Sandow and other ODA leaders flagged reliance on federal funds as an operational risk. Sandow said some ODA program areas—particularly plant protection and conservation—are substantively dependent on federal contracts and agreements, and he estimated that roughly 27% of that division’s budget is federal in origin. Sandow noted that federal trends and the next farm bill will influence the availability of that funding.

Agency leaders walked lawmakers through other budget details that intersect with the IT plan. Adam Crawford, ODA’s chief operating officer, described POP 120 as central to sustaining the agency’s customer service and compliance work into the next decade. Senators and representatives asked questions about the life of bonded borrowing versus the service life of technology assets; Schluntz answered that a cloud/managed-services approach reduces the need for future large capital uplifts because capacity is consumed and adjusted as needed.

Lawmakers also heard that the governor’s recommended budget is largely current service level for ODA but includes one-time allocations that phase out (agency staff identified past one-time funding for Japanese beetle eradication, vine mealy bug response, grasshopper suppression and natural-and-working-lands allocations). The agency also noted a recent federal shift affecting state meat inspection matching and other grant-match programs and said the exact federal match for some programs (including the state meat inspection program) could change.

ODA staff closed by reminding the committee that the next day would include a public hearing to accept testimony on SB 5502 (the department’s budget bill) and SB 5503 (the companion fee bill).

The hearing transcript shows the ODA presentation spanned agency-wide budget, infrastructure, and program updates and that the committee did not take votes during the informational session.