Are you receiving an 85% Increase in Government Services? by Dan Lucas, The Oregon Catalyst
Property taxes are very important to Oregon cities, counties and schools. While the state government’s general fund depends largely on income taxes, county and city governments get most of their tax base from property taxes, and school districts and community colleges get large portions of their funding from property taxes.
Measure 5 and Measure 50, which were passed by Oregon voters in the 1990s, served to slow the growth of property tax collections. Measure 5 limited property taxes to 1.5% of assessed value and Measure 50 limited how quickly the assessed value could be raised to 3% a year.
During the 42 years between 1971 and 2013, statewide property tax collections increased every year, except for five years in the 1990s. My property taxes when I lived in Beaverton went from $1,780 in 1990 to $3,275 in 2013 for the same house – an increase of 84% over 23 years.
Decades later, despite the steady increases in property tax collections, school districts like Hillsboro and Salem-Keizer still call out Measures 5 and 50 as sources of their budget woes.
A February 2014 research report from the Oregon Legislative Revenue Office (LRO) offers some perspective on the effect of those measures on property taxes. The report shows that statewide property tax collections in Oregon went from $2.8 billion in 1999-2000 to $5.2 billion in 2012-2013 — an 85% increase over the 13-year period in the report.
For comparison purposes, during that same 13-year period Oregon personal income taxes went from $4.1 billion to $6.3 billion — a 52% increase. Oregon’s population increased 15% during the 13-year period, growing from 3.4 million to 3.9 million. So both the increases in property tax collections and income tax collections have significantly outstripped population growth, and property tax collections have been increasing faster than personal income taxes, even with Measures 5 and 50.
All the increases in property tax collections are not evenly distributed in every Oregon county, city and other taxing districts. The LRO report notes “Property tax rates differ across the state. The rate on any particular property depends on the tax rates approved by local voters and the limits established in the Oregon Constitution.”
Home owners aren’t the only ones who pay property taxes in Oregon. Oregon businesses pay almost half of the property taxes. In 2012, they paid $2.4 billion out of the total $5.2 billion in Oregon property taxes.
As an example, the top two payers of property taxes to Marion County are PGE and NW Natural Gas. And like homeowners, those aren’t the only property taxes they pay in Marion County. PGE and NW Natural gas also pay property taxes to the City of Salem, Salem Mass Transit, Salem Suburban Rural Fire Protection District, Salem-Keizer School District, Chemeketa Community College and to the other cities in Marion County and their comparable taxing districts — as well as in the other counties in Oregon. So part of all of our monthly electric and gas bills goes to paying those property taxes.
With an 85% increase in statewide property tax collections over the last 13 years, it would be hard to make the case that Oregonians are not already paying enough in property taxes. Additionally, the valuation of your home may have little bearing on what you’re able to afford to pay in annual property taxes. That is especially true for those on fixed incomes.
By Phil Kerpen It was so brazen. Right there, over email, Lois Lerner warned her colleagues “Congress has asked for emails… so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.” Then she asked whether the IRS’s instant messaging application was being archived, and was told that – contrary to law – archiving had been disabled. She responded: “Perfect.” Specifically, IRS staffer Maria Hooke told Lerner “messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exists within the software.” I asked the leading force for government transparency in the country, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whether it was legal for the IRS to disable the archiving function. “It's unlawful to not enable it, and if it is default-enabled, it is unlawful to disable it,” he told me. For support, he pointed me to a 2008 letter from EPA confessing to the National Archivist of “possible unauthorized destruction of computer files,” after discovering that former Administrator Carol Browner had her little-known secondary email account set on auto-delete. So far, IRS has apparently made no such disclosure regarding Lerner’s instant messages, despite it being required under the Federal Records Act. They have offered no explanation for why the archiving function was disabled, deliberately and automatically destroying an entire class of records. Even worse, this appears to be a standard practice across government agencies, especially at the EPA, who Horner is suing in CEI v. EPA, a Federal Records case seeking to compel EPA to stop destroying current Administrator Gina McCarthy’s text messages. Horner has obtained metadata showing texting was increasingly her medium of choice for conducting agency business, which she then illegally destroyed wholesale. EPA replied to the court that Horner’s request is “intrusive,” and that if they choose to disregard the law, nobody should be able to force them to comply. “These agencies have shown they are aware of and know how to perform the law’s requirement to notify the Archivist, which triggers remedial steps to reconstruct these records,” Horner says. “Yet the EPA is insisting it cannot be compelled to do so when it doesn’t want to.” Besides stopping EPA’s cyber-bonfire, Horner hopes a court will ultimately put all of the regulations McCarthy was responsible for — the ‘war on coal’ — on hold until McCarthy’s delated correspondence is reconstructed. If, on the other hand, the court accepts the EPA’s argument, not only will that agency be free to conduct its business in willful violation of the Federal Records Act and, by extension, the Freedom of Information Act (since there will never be any responsive documents), but so will every other agency. Including the IRS, which obviously already has a head start. So CEI v. EPA is really the test case for whether illegal behavior like Lois Lerner’s and Gina McCarthy’s will be given the implicit sanction of federal courts, an effective death blow for accountability and transparency across the federal bureaucracy. The wrong outcome would allow liberal activists in the government to conduct their official business in the dark. Congress would then have to step in and enact a law reaffirming that this is intolerable. What Lerner has already reminded us is that the creation and archiving of all public records should be automatic, permanent, and not subject to unilateral destruction by public officials. “The Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act,” Horner says, “operate on an honor system, contingent upon the honor of those covered by them. So you see the problem.” As the dishonorable Lois Lerner might say: “Perfect.” Phil Kerpen is president of American Commitment, a columnist on Fox News Opinion, chairman of the Internet Freedom Coalition, and author of the 2011 book Democracy Denied.
- Jul 15, 2014
Petunia, the Pork Detective, joined with other groups and attended the Bohemia Mining Days Parade in Cottage Grove, Oregon. She won second place in the parade float contest.
