Oregon Passes Waiver Reform Bill To relief of Ski Industry

Every skier knows the routine. You click into your bindings, zip up your jacket, and, before you load the lift, you sign a piece of paper acknowledging that skiing is dangerous and that you won't sue the resort if something goes wrong. It's a rite of passage at mountains across North America. But for the past twelve years, in Oregon, that signature has been largely meaningless — a piece of paper with no legal teeth. A landmark 2014 Oregon Supreme Court ruling effectively nullified recreational liability waivers in the state, leaving ski areas, rafting outfitters, and climbing gyms without the basic legal protections their counterparts in Washington, California, Colorado, and beyond take for granted.

That decade-long anomaly is now close to being reversed. After contentious back-room negotiations, competing bills, and years of failed legislative attempts, Senate Bill 1517 passed unanimously out of the Oregon House Committee on Rules on March 4, and is headed to a full floor vote. The amended bill would restore the enforceability of liability waivers for health, recreation, and fitness businesses across the state — a category that, at its heart, was always about one industry more than any other: skiing.

"I feel like we are on the precipice of an insurance crisis, especially when we are beholden to for-profit, private insurance."— Rep. Jason Kropf (D-Bend), whose district includes Mt. Bachelor ski area

The story begins nearly two decades ago on the slopes of Mount Bachelor. In 2006, eighteen-year-old Myles Bagley was seriously injured after going over a jump at the Bend resort, leaving him paralyzed. Despite having signed a liability waiver, his family sued. Eight years later, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled in Bagley v. Mt. Bachelor, Inc. that the waiver was "unconscionable" and unenforceable, setting a precedent that would reverberate through Oregon's outdoor economy for years to come.

The immediate impact was muted. But gradually, insurance carriers began reassessing their exposure in a state where any negligence claim — no matter how minor — could proceed to a jury regardless of a signed waiver. One major insurer, Safehold Special Risk, eventually withdrew from the Oregon market entirely. Others that remained began raising their rates sharply, passing the financial pressure directly onto the resorts, who in turn passed it onto their customers in the form of higher lift ticket prices.

Greg Pack, president and general manager of Mount Hood Meadows, has been among the most outspoken voices calling for legislative relief. "It's only getting harder and harder to find liability insurance in the state of Oregon if you are an outdoor recreator," he said during legislative testimony this session. "You are going to see some small businesses fail. You've already seen price increases by other ski areas just to be able to afford the insurance, because many carriers have pulled out of Oregon."

The Oregon Legislature has been trying — and failing — to address the issue for most of the decade since the Bagley ruling. In the 2025 long session alone, two bipartisan bills sponsored by nearly half the Legislature were introduced with broad industry backing, only to stall before a vote. One bill never received a hearing; the other was left sitting on the Senate President's desk despite enough votes to pass. The failure drew sharp criticism from the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association, which called it "the latest in a ten-year pattern of dismissing the issue."

This session arrived with fresh urgency. With the 2026 short session set to expire on March 8, lawmakers knew this was likely the final opportunity before the issue dragged into yet another year. But what emerged wasn't straightforward. Two competing Senate bills — SB 1517 and SB 1593 — took fundamentally different approaches, and the industry found itself divided on which to back.

SB 1593, which had the unanimous support of Oregon's outdoor recreation businesses including ski areas, would have aligned Oregon closely with other western states — allowing businesses to enforce waivers broadly while still permitting lawsuits in cases of gross negligence. SB 1517, authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Floyd Prozanski (D-Eugene), took a narrower approach, initially focused primarily on ski areas and laden with exceptions that industry groups warned would be exploited by plaintiff attorneys. Pack called the original version "the exact opposite of what the industry has been asking for."

With the clock running down, negotiators worked furiously to bridge the gap. After hours of closed-door talks on Tuesday evening, March 3, state leaders reached a compromise. The amended SB 1517 — now broadened to cover all health, recreation and fitness businesses — passed the House Rules Committee the following day without a single dissenting vote. "I think everybody's a little unhappy, and that's OK," said Rep. Emerson Levy (D-Bend). "That's what a negotiation is."

"I hope this relieves some pressure for the businesses that I love in my area."— Rep. Jason Kropf (D-Bend), on mountain towns facing soaring insurance costs

Under the amended legislation, liability waivers signed before recreational activities will once again be legally enforceable in Oregon — a direct reversal of the effect of the 2014 Supreme Court ruling. Customers who sign a waiver acknowledge they are accepting the inherent risks of the activity and agree not to sue for ordinary negligence.

But the bill is not a blanket shield. Customers retain the right to sue under a defined set of circumstances — a compromise that trial lawyers and consumer advocates pushed hard for, and that industry groups ultimately accepted. The law's carve-outs cover incidents involving improper maintenance or inspection of safety equipment; negligent safety-related worker training; abuse, or physical or sexual assault; negligent hiring, credentialing, supervision, or retention of an employee; and incidents involving the operation or use of vehicles.

For ski areas specifically, those exceptions are significant. A skier injured because a lift was improperly maintained, or who was harassed by a negligently hired ski patrol employee, would retain the right to sue regardless of any waiver. What the bill prevents is the kind of broad negligence lawsuit — a simple slip and fall, a collision on a run, an injury from a jump — that plaintiffs' attorneys have been able to file since 2014 and that insurers have priced into their Oregon premiums ever since.

The practical stakes for Oregon's ski industry are considerable. The state's resorts — anchored by household names like Mount Hood Meadows, Timberline Lodge, Skibowl, and Mount Bachelor — collectively serve hundreds of thousands of skiers and snowboarders each season and form the economic backbone of communities along the Mount Hood corridor and in Central Oregon around Bend. When insurance costs rise, those costs flow directly to families in the form of lift ticket price increases and pass hikes.

Rep. Kropf, whose Bend-area district includes Mount Bachelor, said business owners there have watched their premiums skyrocket despite years of clean safety records. "These are businesses that have been operating for decades without significant legal claims," he said. "And yet they're being priced out of the insurance market simply because Oregon's legal framework is unlike everywhere else." Kropf said he hoped the bill would begin to stabilize that market and bring carriers — including those that have left the state — back to the table.

Not everyone is convinced the compromise goes far enough. Some industry voices, including those who had championed SB 1593, warned that the exceptions in the amended bill remain broad enough to invite creative lawyering. And Sen. Sollman, in a formal vote explanation, argued that the legislation "undermines the predictability the insurance market needs to bring down rates." William Curtis, a senior vice president at Safehold Sports, was blunt in written testimony: insurers who left Oregon are unlikely to return unless the legal framework closely mirrors other states, and whether the amended bill achieves that remains an open question.

Lauren Bagley, whose son Myles was at the center of the case that started all of this, offered a different kind of caution during this session's hearings — a reminder that the 2014 ruling existed for a reason. "There are no guarantees from insurance companies that they will lower the rates," she testified, pushing back against the central argument made by resort operators. Her words hung in the air of the hearing room, a sobering counterweight to the industry optimism around the bill.

The bill now heads to the full Oregon House floor for a vote, with the session deadline of March 8 serving as a hard deadline. If it passes and reaches Governor Tina Kotek's desk in time, Oregon will finally join the rest of the American West in recognizing the basic legal validity of a recreational liability waiver.

"We have been in the middle of this for a long time and a lot of hours," said Rep. Kim Wallan (R-Medford), one of the bipartisan voices who helped broker the deal. "We believe this is a good Oregon solution."

Good enough, perhaps, for now. Oregon's ski resorts won't have everything they wanted from this legislative session. The waivers they'll be able to enforce are more limited than those used in Colorado or Washington. The insurance market may take time — years, even — to respond. And the underlying tension between an industry's need for legal predictability and the public's right to hold businesses accountable for genuine negligence has not been fully resolved. It has simply been rebalanced.

But for the first time in twelve seasons, when a skier at Mount Hood Meadows or Mount Bachelor signs that piece of paper at the ticket window, it will actually mean something. That, at least, is a start.