SALEM — Two proposals affecting large livestock operations in Oregon won’t face any more legislative deadlines this year, meaning they could remain active as long as lawmakers remain in session.

Senate Bill 85, which would suspend permits for the biggest confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, has already weathered three pointed hearings on different versions of the concept.

Senate Bill 398, meanwhile, has yet to be hashed out in public and effectively remains a blank slate as a three-paragraph “study bill” that can be “gutted and stuffed” with more extensive provisions related to CAFOs.

The Senate Natural Resources Committee has now voted 3-2 to move both pieces of legislation to the Senate Rules Committee, where bills aren’t subject to the voting deadlines that periodically pare down the number of proposals under consideration by lawmakers.

“That conversation is not finished. It’s actively going on with main stakeholders and we want to see what kind of policy we can get to in this space,” said Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, during an April 3 work session on the bills.

Negotiations may continue until the end of the 2023 legislative session, which must conclude by June 25, since both bills can now stay alive without any further committee action.

The debate over CAFOs is nothing new in the Legislature, though until now it’s often centered on what critics characterize as “mega-dairies,” such as a controversial facility in Boardman that was shut down due to wastewater violations.

Restrictions on CAFOs have repeatedly failed to pass muster in earlier sessions, but plans to build poultry CAFOs capable of producing millions of chickens in the Willamette Valley have added new fuel to the controversy.

Critics claim the state’s CAFO rules don’t prevent them from polluting the air and water while allowing them to treat animals inhumanely and drive smaller farms out of business.

Supporters of an 8-year moratorium on the largest tier of facilities under SB 85 say a “time out” is needed to study their impacts and modernize the regulations.

Mainstream agriculture groups have united against the so-called “strong moratorium” as well as a scaled-backed version that would suspend permits for two years and only apply to poultry.

The bill’s opponents say CAFOs are also family farms that have grown to withstand the rising cost of regulations, which are among the strictest and best-enforced in the country.

With the “very robust discussion” that SB 85 has received, Sen. David Brock Smith, R-Port Orford, said he opposes referring the bill to another committee, even though it’s not recommended for approval.

“I’m just concerned that if we move this to Rules and start over, really, it would be problematic,” he said.

The shift to a new committee doesn’t mean the bill will be “going back to square one,” since the conversation will continue among the “leading factions” on the issue, said Golden.

“We’re not going to throw this at a Rules Committee that hasn’t heard this stuff and say go figure this out,” he said.

Brock Smith said he’s even more troubled by the referral of SB 398 because it’s “just a placeholder” that requires farm regulators to study CAFOs, meaning substantive changes won’t be considered by a natural resources policy committee.

“We haven’t had any discussion on any of the aspects that could be amended into this piece of legislation,” he said.