As I travel around the country leading Community Rights workshops, I constantly have to remind the mostly progressive audiences I meet with that it’s not just Republican-controlled state legislatures that are constantly trying to stop local governments from exercising any kind of relevant law-making. In my state of Oregon, which has a Democrat supermajority in the legislature, a Democrat Attorney General, and a Democrat Governor, it’s the same old same old.
Below is just the latest example of what a Democrat state legislature is capable of, to further dismantle any semblance of local community self-government, and why we must stop conceptualizing our political crisis as Left vs Right, and instead reorient our politics so that we pay a lot more attention to Top vs Bottom, the 1% vs the 99%, and Federal and State vs Local. — Paul Cienfuegos, written on May 9th, 2019
(SALEM) — On Wednesday, May 1, the Oregon House approved – along party lines – HB 3427 (2019) creating an expansive new education tax.
In a transparent effort to mollify the expected opposition, Section 67 of the bill severely restricts local taxing powers.
Section 67 prohibits local residents from – in the future – using the initiative to create local programs funded by local taxes “upon commercial activity or upon receipts from grocery sales.”
Section 67 also prohibits city governments – even if they have a “Home Rule” charter – from adopting the same kind of local taxes.
Section 67 ignores:
* The “Home Rule” powers found – in part – in Oregon Constitution, Article XI, § 2; and,
* The local petition powers found in Oregon Constitution, Article IV, § 1(5).
Warned Wasson: “It should alarm Oregon citizens that the legislature feels so free to treat the state Constitution as a mere suggestion.”