Meet Rob Nosse

Rob Nosse is currently the state representative for HD 42 which consists of inner SE and a little sliver of NE Portland. He has been the state representative for this area of Portland since 2014. In 2021 and 2022 he served on the Ways and Means Committee where he was the sub-committee co-chair for human services, and he also served as Vice Chair of the House Behavioral Health Care Committee. With those two roles Representative Nosse was able to steer and over $1.3 billion dollars in state, federal and state marijuana revenues into a series of behavioral health bills and budgets — one of the largest investments in behavioral and mental health in decades during the 2021 and 2022 sessions. In 2023 he worked on bills to address abortion access and transgender health care, hospital staffing particularly for nurses, and fixes to the operations of Ballot Measure 110.
He currently serves as the Chair of the House Behavioral Health and Healthcare Committee where is working on two big bills one about BM 110 operations and another about hospital staffing. He is also the leader of a newly created arts and culture caucus trying to get more support for arts and culture opportunities across the state.
Representative Nosse lives in SE Portland with his husband Jim Laden. He is an
activist/organizer at heart. He has worked his entire working life to try and make positive social change for students, working families and nurses that improves their lives and economic livelihood. He started out as a student organizer in the 80s and 90s with the Oregon Student Association trying to support public higher education.

He then went on to work for the Service Employees International Union and the Oregon Nurses Association from 2004 to 2020 where for almost twenty years he advocated for working people/nurses as a union representative. He is happy to say that while collective bargaining is sometimes a contentious process, he believes in the end he had mostly good working relationships with the employers – hospitals and county health departments, even when things were contentious.

He is the proud father of two Portland Public Schools alumni, and the grandfather of three prospective PPS students.
Representative Nosse has also been an activist on LGBTQ rights since he moved here to work for the Oregon Student Association in 1992 (He grew up in Ohio). He helped to bring students from every part of the state together to fight Ballot Measure 9, a discriminatory right-wing measure to establish a strong anti-gay culture in Oregon.
Before joining the legislature, he served as a board member of Basic Rights Oregon Equality PAC helping to elect pro LGBTQ candidates to elected office and worked to bring marriage equality to our state. He also volunteered at his Church St Philip Neri a Roman Catholic Church in the Ladds Addition neighborhood, and he still serves on the
board of the Oregon Student Foundation an organization that he helped to start.