It’s been a remarkable sequence of events in Salem in the last six months, particularly since the new year.
When the Gas Tax didn’t sail through the Legislature last spring, failing to pass before the Long Session ended in June, eyebrows went up around the state.
Then Gov. Kotek called the Legislature together last fall to ram it through – successfully, it appeared. The Legislature proceeded to pass the $4.3 billion gas tax package, which slapped a 6-cent tax increase on each gallon of gasoline for state drivers and substantially raised vehicle registration fees.
Kotek signed it in November, a move widely seen as calculated to make it harder for opponents to gather signatures for a referendum to recall the package approved by her and legislators, ODOT’s snowplows went back to work and everything was fine.
Except it wasn’t.
In a few short weeks referendum organizers and workers, including those who stood for days under pop-ups in the rain in Lebanon and Sweet Home, gathering signatures, had collected enough names to easily qualify for the ballot – a quarter million, in fact.
Our Democratic leadership is clearly rattled.
Their party has controlled Oregon’s three offices of government – executive (the last Republican governor served some 40 years ago), both houses of the legislature) and, really, much of the judiciary for decades. They have held a supermajority, at least three-fifths of the seats in both chambers of the legislature, almost continuously since 2018.
It is residents who have paid the price.
A 2024 study by FinanceBuzz.com found Oregonians spend the second-highest amount of their annual income on taxes (approximately 23.37%) in the nation, trailing only Massachusetts. It didn’t used to be this way. Oregonians, less than a decade ago, were ranked in the middle, nationally, in terms of their tax burden.
Since 2019, Oregon’s total effective state and local business tax rate has risen by close to 30%. This is heavily driven by the Corporate Activity Tax (CAT) passed in 2019, which created a new tax on gross receipts in addition to existing corporate income taxes.
The Tax Foundation recently ranked Oregon as the 35th-worse state in tax competitiveness.
We’re consistently ranked near the bottom in educational achievement. Housing affordability and Oregon’s cost of living are both in the bottom 20% of the 50 states, as rated by U.S. News and World Report.
Businesses are leaving. I was just in Grants Pass last week, where the headquarters of Dutch Bros, a nearly $9.5 billion company born right there in Southern Oregon, is about to become a children’s museum after the company moved its corporate operations to Tempe, Ariz.
I drove by. I saw the sign announcing the change.
These things don’t happen on whims. Reporting by journalists from the Oregon Journalism Project, Capital Chronicle, the Oregonian and others have uncovered increasing evidences of serious issues with state government – particularly at the bureaucratic level.
The Oregon Department of Transportation debacle, the Oregon Health Authority’s failures in implementing Measure 110, problems in the Oregon Department of Corrections, the Department of Human Services, the bungled rollout of Medicaid dollars for rent assistance and failed programs that were supposed to help the homeless and drug users – these are just some of the problems that chafe responsible, tax-paying Oregon citizens.
The question is whether anybody in power is seeing these problems, actually taking responsibility for them.
Literally every day I get emails from both sides of the aisle in Salem, probably because I’m a newspaper editor. Although I’m busy with local news and can’t always actually read all of them, I don’t mind getting them because they give me a sense of what’s happening in the Capitol.
As might be expected, there’s been a lot of crowing about the success of that referendum effort from one side of the aisle.
From the other side I’m hearing about how we need to renovate the Moda Center, how Oregon is gearing up to battle the Trump Administration on immigration, environmental and climate policy, abortion, civil liberties, etc.
I’m seeing finger-pointing and obfuscating.
Just this week one missive arrived trumpeting Senate Bill 1507, introduced to close the “tax loopholes overwhelmingly used by the wealthy and big corporations.”
The news release I received blamed the Trump tax package for blowing a “$900 million hole in Oregon’s budget with tax cuts largely going toward the wealthy and big corporations” which, it noted, were automatically adopted into the Oregon tax code.
The proposed bill, the release added, would cut taxes for low-to-moderate income households in the state and protect needed funding for “education, health care and public safety.”
My purpose here is not to delve into all of that, but I certainly get the feeling that the powers that be apparently realize that people on the ground are not happy.
Recently, House Majority Leader Ben Bowman announced that the Oregon House will participate in further legislative oversight with “Outcomes Reviews” encouraging “legislative members, agencies and partners” to assess, review and improve the implementation of previously passed laws.
The goal, he said, is to enhance outcomes for Oregonians, further community engagement and make sure Oregon laws are working as intended.
Well, they’re right. A lot of things are not working.
What they apparently don’t realize is that a lot of our unhappiness, at least for many rural residents, stems from questionable (to put it kindly) policies that have gotten us to the place described above.
Historically, Oregon has had a spirit of “can do” – particularly in rural populations. It also has a spirit of live and let live. But how long residents eyeing their giant tax bills that ostensibly pay for services and programs that appear to be poorly managed, at best, will allow this to continue, is a good question that the powers should be considering.
But unless leaders arise who can wisely steer our laws, educational system, our bureaucracies toward the goal of collective contribution away from dependence on the state and more individual responsibility that contributes to economic success, nothing’s going to change.