Whenever her family’s farming operation buys property, Rep. Anna Scharf, R-Amity, hopes the parcel doesn’t have a home on it.

“The last thing I want to do is have more housing to manage,” she said.

If single-family homes offered to farmworkers must comply with new state rules for farm labor camps, Scharf says she’d be even more averse to owning such dwellings.

“I would drip torch my houses if I was at risk, before I would take this on,” she said during a recent legislative hearing.

Though farmers may not actually set fire to worker housing, several agricultural organizations fear they may stop offering it to employees rather than undertake expensive remodels required for labor camps.

“At a time the governor says we need housing, this has the potential to shut down a significant chunk of housing,” said Rep. Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles.

To avoid that outcome, Bonham has proposed excluding single-family homes offered to farmworkers, including those occupied by five or fewer employees, from the state’s new regulations for agricultural labor camps.

His proposal, Senate Bill 999, recently won a reprieve from legislative deadlines when the Senate Labor and Business Committee voted, 4-1, to move it to the House Rules Committee, where it will remain active until the end of the 2025 legislative session.

Single-family dwellings are often offered to farm employees as a “fringe benefit” at reduced prices or for free, but growers may reconsider that generosity if the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration will require financially unfeasible upgrades, said Jenny Dresler, lobbyist for the Oregon Farm Bureau.

“Farm operators are terrified of enforcement action,” Dresler said.

The bill intends to resolve a legal controversy about which structures are subject to OSHA’s new farm labor camp rules, which were implemented earlier this year.

The Office of Legislative Counsel, which advises lawmakers, determined that single-family homes are meant to be entirely exempt from the labor camp rules. However, the state’s Department of Justice said that such dwellings don’t have to be registered as labor camps but must still abide by OSHA’s new standards.

While SB 999 would resolve the disagreement, farmworker advocates said they’re worried the bill will have unintended consequences and leave workers living in single-family homes without regulatory protections.

In some cases, farmers have installed trailers on their land to house workers, which effectively serve the function of labor camps, said Kate Suisman, attorney for the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project.

“Some of those trailers are really in poor condition. You could have eight, 10, 12 people in a trailer that’s meant for many fewer people,” she said.

To address those concerns, Bonham amended the bill to clarify that such single-family homes would still fall under the habitability standards required by Oregon’s landlord-tenant law.

However, SB 999’s opponents argue that such single-family dwellings would only be subject to habitability standards and not other provisions of landlord-tenant law, while losing protections as labor camps.

Since the bill’s effects are still prone to debate, moving it to the House Rules Committee will serve as a temporary “compromise” that at least allows negotiations to continue, said Sen. Kathleen Taylor, D-Portland.

Bonham said his main goal for the legislation is to preserve farmworkers’ access to such single-family dwellings, particularly since housing is expensive in agricultural areas such as the Columbia Gorge.

“We don’t want to eliminate this housing from availability,” he said.