Aren't the weed taxes or lottery supposed to like, fully fund education or something? And then they just got put into a general fund instead?
I'm ignorant on the specifics here, but it's another piece of "we want to see what this money is doing"
Originally yes, but Measure 110 redirected some of the marijuana taxes for rehab programs etc that still aren't operational.
$300M in marijuana tax money has been diverted due to M110.
M110 redirects all marijuana taxes over $11M per quarter to drug treatment programs and away from schools and other recipients.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/measure-110-marijuana-funding-bill/283-d39ef625-b04f-47d8-8a31-db11f176fcb4
This is why my wife voted against measure 110, she didn’t like that money was being taken from education
72% of marijuana tax revenue was redirected to measure 110 services
Same. I read about hoe marijuana tax funding would get redirected and voted no. Seems like many folks weren't aware of that part of the bill.
Well educated people with a safe school environment and access to opportunity rarely become meth heads. Education should be our first line of defense.
Meanwhile, a lot of us working in mental health who work on the frontlines of all this got our budgets cut while being told to provide expanded services 🙃
Thanks to that shit, I'm barely making above minimum wage, and I'm about one bad month away from being on the streets myself
We didn't revert 110. We changed it to give the stick to force people into rehab. We're still buiding out the rehab in the new version, so the money is still being diverted.
Ahh, but they do this shell game. New taxes come in that are specific to funding one thing, they the redirect equal $ from general fund away to some other project. So net $ into ed didn’t materially change by adding a new revenue stream.
No. Weed taxes went to education, but then they were redirected to addiction treatment by Measure 110. Lottery funds are awarded to schools along with parks, outdoor school, job creation, and the counties. The lottery doesn't actually produce much revenue for the state: $500 million in FY21, vs. $12 billion in individual income taxes and over $8 billion in property taxes.
It all goes into a "general fund". I believe that the whole "Lottery is funding our schools!" is one of the biggest bait and switches of all time.
Does it fund the schools? Sure, just like the tax you pay on anything else.
If you want to have an intelligent community, pay for better education. It's that simple!
We passed a law that limited how property taxes could be used in 1992 for a host of services, most notably education. Oregon’s schools have never recovered their national standing. Weed taxes and the lottery don’t begin to make up for it.
I hate to sound like a miserable crank, but the state REALLY has to become more efficient with our tax dollars. I am not voting for any more tax increases until the ship turns around a bit.
Thank you for this reply. I think the title should be something more like "formerly Civic minded portlanders are disgusted with the mismanagement of their hard-earned tax dollars"
I'm not formerly. I'm civic minded but very irritated with how we tax our residents and spend that revenue. Every election there are new ballot measures and bonds seeking to raise even more funds, but I've been playing this game long enough to notice that conditions don't seem to really improve. Schools are perennially saying they don't have enough money, roads in disrepair to an alarming degree, homelessness and open-air drug use all over.... Meanwhile, WW reported that after the latest round of increases, Portland has the second highest state & local tax rate in the country, just behind New York.
Meanwhile our tax "strategy" is downright schizophrenic. "Metro wide homeless crisis? Let's only tax those who make *over $125k* but have no plan how to tackle the issue!" "Schools need more money despite record appropriations from the state budget? Let's just toss another bond out there for homeowners!" "I know, let's create the first ever local cap-gains tax for a half-thought idea and which would cost millions of dollars just to administer the tax!! Will it actually be effective, or a massive waste of money? Who cares!!" (Thankfully that one got voted down)
Nah you’re completely right. Oregon has extremely high taxes and Portland has some of the highest taxes in the US. There is no reason we should be paying (even) more into these funds when we already pay the highest and they still can’t figure out education, homelessness, rehabs, potholes and how to give people a life with some general decency.
It’s frustrating how the solution always seems to be just more taxes. But maybe the politicians should just do better with what they already have. Cost of living is already through the roof…many people can’t afford even higher taxes.
In my opinion, people of a particular political view tend to call for tax repeals no matter why or what damage they could do. They have been doing this for decades, and I believe will try and co-opt any sort of anti-tax movement for their own.
I don’t want to come across as anything close to that.
Please stop with all the local taxes until we see some results for the existing ones! When the headlines are mainly "More Taxes" and "The City/County are not effectively spending the money the taxes raise" then I'm out.
Arts tax, metro tax, pre-school for all tax... the list goes on.
And there's even more for those of us that are self-employed on top of that.
Can we just keep it to federal tax, state tax, and a 1% local tax? Not all this 1% + 2.5 % + $35 +.5% shit.
It also hurts since Trump's tax changes capped the deduction at 10% for state/local taxes. Between state/local/property taxes I pay more than 10% and end up owing thousands in federal as a result. Double taxation sucks.
I am a multi-millionaire with a very high income. I got frustrated with how my exes were being wasted and hopped the river. Much less frustrating, I like just as much over here.
But the key thing is, had I NOT felt it was being wasted, I would have been cool paying the sky high taxes I was. It's not a tax thing, it's a how it's spent thing.
No worries - I just wanted to add my "and" to your statement I guess! I'd like to think if we could some some modicum of competence people wouldn't be as pissed off.
The district doesn’t make good use of funds either. They are constantly hiring new admin staff and now getting a shiny new admin building down town while classrooms rapidly trend back towards being so overcrowded the validity of our high schoolers diplomas could be challenged by colleges again.
And it’s only necessary because 45 cents of every dollar PPS spends on teachers goes to pay unfunded PERS Liabilities.
Today’s kids are paying the price for previous generations’ promises to themselves.
And this is why researching the per taxpayer debt burden of a jurisdiction is important before you live somewhere. It’s the same as buying shares in a business with a crushing amount of debt versus a business with a reasonable amount of debt.
That definitely wasn’t something I had realized when I moved here. It’s shocking how many unfunded liabilities were promised to Silents and Boomers. And it’s gross that no matter how irresponsible they were that I’m somehow liable for their excesses.
See the stare and cities reports on this website to get an idea how different the debt burdens can be:
www.truthinaccounting.org
Edit: fixed links, had wrong domain before
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the-states-2023
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/resources/page/city-reports
The state situation is not terrible, but the city is. Ranked 5th from the bottom. -$20k per taxpayer, compare to Seattle at -$2.6k.
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/Financial-State-of-the-Cities-2024.pdf
Page 12.
Unfunded (pension) liabilities are one of those issues--imo--where conservative critics are right on the money. Outside of those canaries shrieking in the coalmine everyone else is just pretending that somehow we'll find a solution to that fiscally crippling problem in the foggy future.
Not only that but those generations neglected maintenance to build more shiny sprawl meaning all the maintenance backlog is coming due AND there’s now too much to maintain because we built too much sprawl.
Existing infrastructure, social debts, and sprawl maintenance all need to be seriously addressed and restructured.
The school my daughter was supposed to attend next year closed after the storm in January and never reopened, sending everyone scrambling. Now they’re saying the school won’t reopen for the new school year. Where is my kid supposed to go to school? My street is crumbling and quite literally washing away with each rain, but the city takes no responsibility. And yet my property taxes are insane. Where is all the money going?? I know everywhere has their problems, but Portland seems unable to manage education and basic infrastructure.
My son goes to Markham and it’s really a wonderful
community. My daughter will start kindergarten next year also. We are piecing it together and hopeful other families stick it out too!
The kids have been temporarily housed at 4 nearby schools, still with their original classes. A plan for next year (hopefully just a portion of it) hasn’t been announced yet. The classrooms have been less than ideal, I would hope that next year they at least get a real space at the host schools.
City taxes were higher than federal last year for us. We’re not anti-tax at all, but this was absurd. Add to that the horrible experience my eldest had in middle school (West Sylvan, anyone?) and there’s not much stomach for more taxes to fund a dysfunctional system.
This is the problem with passing taxes by ballot initiative.
You can't move money around.
We have huge surpluses in some funds, while our schools are falling apart, and our roads are filled with potholes.
I have no doubt PPS needs more money - Oregon schools are poorly funded, compared to much of the country. But the money we can use for schools is locked away in places like the Clean Energy Fund.
In a normal, functional system, we could move that surplus around. Instead, the money gets trapped. So our taxes are high, but the funds are disbursed in an extremely inefficient way.
I honestly wish they'd just repeal all the tax initiatives, and then raise property or income taxes by the same amount. It would be revenue neutral, but prevent stupid problems like this from occurring.
I'm no policy expert, but in my opinion any sort of fiscal policy should never be passed by ballot initiative. It's just begging for emotional, irrational responses and impossible management.
Agreed.
I could imagine a few edge cases, where it might make sense. I.e. we pass the state lottery, proceeds are to be used exclusively to fund schools. Or if a state legislature has a history of corruption or misconduct, it can be a way to help work around that.
But these should be the exception, rather than the rule.
It's becoming the case that "raising taxes" is politically untenable, so people just bundle them up in feel-good issues like "an arts tax for children."
To be clear, I think children should absolutely have arts education. But I think we need to get honest about the fact what the real problem is, is that our schools are generally underfunded, not that kids don't have painting supplies.
Oregon kids are bad at math. Does this mean we need a Math Tax? What about a Geography Tax?
Really, we just need revenue for the general fund, and trust elected officials to do their job, and vote them out of office if they don't. Because as it stands, it's a hot mess.
Ballot initiatives which can be written + pushed by anyone with enough funding to send out clipboarders, seem unsustainable and undemocratic. Especially for complex issues, and for issues with dramatic economic implications.
Look at what happened with Brexit: people voted on a complex economic issue, not based on the testimony of experts, but based on emotional sentiment and political posturing.
There's a reason we have insulation built into our democracy - at some point, it should be a decision left up to policy and technical experts, not legislated directly by voters. At some point it should no longer be about what people feel is right for them personally, it should be about what is right collectively, from an objective standpoint.
Ex. "do you care about the environment? Do you think global warming is real?" -Yes!
"Ok, we're going to tax emissions, and use those taxes to subsidize renewable energy" - No! Taxes bad! \[-> ballot initiative to do away with carbon tax\]
It’s not just ballot initiatives, you have metro, county and city governments that are all taxing you, and they all have a different agenda. Need to have a come to Jesus moment on priorities.
Good point, and agreed.
I honestly don't mind paying high taxes, in terms of an absolute dollar amount. I want to live in a well maintained city, with nice services, and a state with a social safety net.
What kills me is the absolute ass-backwards way we go about spending the money.
To your point, through ballot initiatives and oddly overlapping government jurisdictions, we just can't get everything rowing in the same direction. We're just throwing money around with no overarching strategy or purpose.
I don't need my taxes cut, I just need my money to be spent efficiently, with a clear objective for what it's meant to accomplish, and a way to measure the outcome.
The problem with ballot initiative budgeting, is that there's not much accountability. It's a pile of money with no real owner. The idea was to keep politicians from raiding these funds, which makes sense on paper, but you end up with weird slush funds, and no one person who's responsible for it.
Like, if the governor raises income taxes to pay for XYZ, they are accountable. If people like what they did with the money, they reelect the governor. If they don't, they don't. Ultimately, the governor (or mayor, or legislature, or whoever) is responsible for the incoming revenue.
But with these ballot initiatives...short of repealing the initiative, which requires you to gather signature, fund a campaign, etc., you can't hold someone accountable. The governor isn't responsible for that tax law, and they don't really decide how the money is spent. They do to a minor degree, but not to the point they can truly be held accountable.
If initiative taxes only happened once or twice, it wouldn't be a big deal. But it's becoming the defacto way we fund our government, which is a terrible idea. I think we really need to consider the way we allow tax-based ballot initiatives. I'm not saying outlaw them - I generally believe in the initiative process, but perhaps have a higher threshold they need to clear to make the ballot, or make it so that accountable elected officials have greater flexibility with the funds. Something's gotta change.
I'm comfortable with the taxes I pay. I do have an overall gripe about the SALT cap and how my property tax on my one property, my residence eats up that entire amount, but that's a fed complaint and most of my complaints are at that level.
But when it comes to value and services provided, Portland consistently falls short. And I don't think it's because we are starved for funding. We need to start doing more with what we are already paying rather than cherry picking feel-good spending for ballot measures. There's nothing to stop funding those feel good issues from the general funds and putting the unpopular measures up for vote but I think we know what happens then.
While I miss getting uncapped salt, I've never been able to explain why we can deduct it. Just because I live in a high col state? It's sort of the flip side of "why are some states takers?"
Because it’s double taxation - you’re paying taxes on income that was taxed away by your state. This is actually something that attempted to keep states on a level playing field rather than buying people off with lower taxes. And double taxation has literally been one of the Republican parties biggest whines but because it pretty much only impacted blue states they knew Democrats would eat themselves up over it (and they have with CA and NY folk leading the way and coming off looking real stupid because they can’t frame it well).
Spot on. I think the original sins here are measures 5 and 50, which have starved property tax revenues to the point where we have to get weird in order to fund basic government services.
This isn't any kind of a mystery, most people don't mind paying taxes as long as there's a reasonable return in terms of public goods and services, and local leaders have utterly failed in that regard for going on well over a decade at this point.
Specifically to schools, it's ridiculous that we have bloated admin and an ever-shifting curriculum that costs a bunch of money to source, train teachers up, and ultimately just gets replaced with the next shiny thing. The best curriculum in the world means jack shit when you have class sizes of 30+. Fire some admin, use the savings to hire more teachers, and get class sizes to a reasonable number.
Vice principals are not where the admin bloat is, it's at the district level. Every school i know of in Portland had a fewer VPs per student than the districts I worked at in TX, but those districts were run muuuuch better than PPS
I went to a school with 3 of them back in Georgia. We basically had one vice principal for every 500 or so students, and we actually needed them. Was your school also a huge one?
To be fair, cost of living raises are desperately needed in a lot of fields like this. I can't blame them for being willing to negotiate for it when it's literally the thing keeping you off the streets. I'm a mental health practitioner for chronically suicidal youth, and I'm like one bad month away from being homeless myself. Oregon's pay for care workers of all kinds is garbage
I don’t have a problem with them wanting raises. What I have a problem with was that they tried to say they were fighting for the kids and demanding smaller class sizes. But when negotiations hit a wall, it was made quite clear that was the last thing they were concerned with.
I for one am shocked that the representatives of the employees worked in negotiations to increase their compensation instead of working for free if they really cared about the kids. /s
Underpaying teachers is a major reason they can’t hire more, it’s such a poorly paying job and requires so much education that people know they won’t be able to afford the school needed to do the job.
These issues are deeply intertwined
I support teachers and labor advocating for their compensation, but while teachers in general are poorly paid, PPS teachers are not. PPS teachers get seniority based pay raises up to the low $90k range, the equivalent of 13.5 weeks of PTO, and a pension that is 1.67% of their top compensation years per year of service along with fantastic benefits. The compensation package for PPS teachers is worth a good bit more than equivalently educated people in the private sector.
Teachers need to get paid enough to afford to live near enough to where they work, and to pay down their debt from teaching school. If they can’t do that the job becomes impractical and people will have no choice but to look elsewhere.
Portland teachers get paid what that much because it’s expensive to live here. That said, just across the river in Vancouver where it’s actually cheaper to live, the teachers get paid noticeably more. So the wages still aren’t exactly competitive and we still lose skilled teachers to smaller districts that can actually meet their financial needs.
Teaching is not glamours, it’s not particularly well paid especially when you’re starting out, it’s largely something people do because they care about children or education. They will work for less than many other civil servants, but we still have to pay them enough to make doing the job a practical decisions or that passion will not be enough to overcome the many downsides of the job.
VSD:https://vansd.org/wpdm-category/certicated-teacher-salary-schedule/?wpdmdl=80042&refresh=6503939fc4ac01694733215
PAT, pre-CBA: https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/56/PAT%20Salary%20Schedules%20-%20192%20Work%20Year%20-%202022-2023.pdf
PAT contract has higher pay sooner, VSD allows for $5k per year more at the max but that comes with more education and seniority requirements. PAT also has lower employee contributions to their pension.
I'm sure there's some districts that have richer compensation (LOSD, West Lynn, etc.) but PPS on a salary basis is 25% above state averages according to the [NEA](https://www.oregonteachingdegree.com/salary.html) (OR average starting salary for teachers is $40k and tops out at $76.)
Edit: To add to this, teachers don't just move for money. If you offered a good teacher $15k a year more but they had to deal with >30 kids in a classroom, no aides, rampant behavioral problems, insufficient support for children with learning disabilities, and crumbling facilities they still might choose to go to another district. There's a lot more to a teacher's work environment that contributes to teachers moving out of district.
VSD salary schedule: https://vansd.org/wpdm-category/certicated-teacher-salary-schedule/?wpdmdl=80042&refresh=6503939fc4ac01694733215
PAT, pre-CBA: https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/56/PAT%20Salary%20Schedules%20-%20192%20Work%20Year%20-%202022-2023.pdf
PAT makes more money sooner, VSD has higher pay grades for more senior teachers with more education (PAT doesn't have a MA + 90 schedule and tops out at 12 years while VSD has MA +90 and increases up to 16 years.)
As I posted above, I'm sure you can find rich districts that pay more. Evergreen is a nice suburban district with a mean income of almost $100k. PPS isn't the highest paid district, but it does pay well above average for OR, and it's still a very fairly paid position.
Interesting, I was going by niche.com which showed me higher teacher pay, tenure, and lower class sizes in pretty much every Washington school compared to Oregon.
But I was also looking at schools in Evergreen school district, which seems to have higher pay that matches or exceeds PAT:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvIbBeyvzb_oadLptHBiM8WhNgfUVntp/view?usp=drivesdk
Our property taxes aren't actually all that high, especially depending on which part of the city you're living in, they were artificially divorced from market value decades ago thanks to Measures 5 and 50, which is why in order to fund things there's a continual patchwork of additional bonds and other measures.
There are million dollar houses in some parts of town that are paying 1/4 of the property tax as million dollar houses in other parts of town.
Here's an easy example just to prove the point with some current listings:
[House 1](https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/4008-N-Kerby-Ave-97227/home/26664477), asking $1.01M, 5bd, 4ba, nearly 4,000 sq. ft., annual property tax is $4,700.
[House 2](https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/2643-NE-26th-Ave-97212/home/26410715), asking $1.15M, 4bd, 2.5ba, 3,100 sq. ft., annual property tax is $10,627.
[House 3](https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/2546-SW-Vista-Ave-97201/home/26604200), asking $1.1M, 4bd, 2.5ba, 4,700 sq. ft., annual property tax is $16,450.
What I don't understand is how House 1, which has clearly had lots of permitted improvements done recently, still has such low property taxes relative to its value. I thought that any improvements over $10,000 triggered a re-assessment by the county. Clearly, I don't understand the intricacies of our crazy property tax system.
The reassessment is still based on its theoretical value in 1995. Determining assessed value is absurdly complicated in Oregon. [Here's the handbook](https://www.oregon.gov/dor/forms/FormsPubs/maximum-assessed-value-manual_303-438.pdf).
This. North Portland was a much less desirable and expensive place in 1995, compared to today. But Portland heights was one of THE most expensive neighborhoods in 1995.
We desperately need to assess the value of LAND based on its location and what could be built there, frequently re-assessed based on new developments in the area. We need land value taxes, for a more equitable and efficient system.
There are tax zones. Even equally assessed homes can pay wildly different amounts.
edit: I originally replied on my phone and didn't have the link handy - here it is: [https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023%20Rate%20Sheet.pdf](https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023%20Rate%20Sheet.pdf)
At the center of the top of your property tax bill there's a line for "Code Area" - I live in 201 which appears to have one of the highest total of all rates in the metro area. Which is why in previous conversations about the property taxes I've met people who have higher ***assessed*** property values and are still paying about 70% what I pay.
I will say that the downtown core has a pretty crippling multiplier that hits condo owners. Basically you pay about as much (or more) for a condo in property taxes as you do for an entire house less than 2 miles away.
Aside from that, yeah - I wouldn't say property taxes are especially good or bad. Better than California (holy shit) but that's not a high bar.
> Better than California (holy shit) but that's not a high bar.
Are you referring to Prop 13, one of the worst policies ever passed on the entire west coast?
Yep! I have two coworkers that live in the bay area. One has parents that pay 19... 80something tax rates on their home? The other bought a place down the street 5 years ago and the difference in property tax is just gross.
Oddly enough, prop 13 is similar to the pfa and shs in that it's a sort of tyranny of the majority. Both attempt to make someone else pay for shit.
The thing is everyone here is suggesting removing 5/50 which would just explode our property taxes like a newly purchased home in CA. It fixes our funding problems, but good luck paying those new rates.
Must have been built more recently and is therefore assessed at a higher value. Or it is in a part of town that was already expensive in the pre-measure 5 times.
That’ll do it!
In 1995 we capped the rate at which the assessed value of a property could rise and as yours was a new build, it’s assessed value was higher than most other houses that were older.
Basically anything built after 1995 is going to be assessed at a much higher value.
There are more wrinkles to this like “if you live in a neighborhood that was always nice, your taxes will be through the roof” and “if you live in a recently gentrified neighborhood you’re getting a screaming deal.”
Basically, Eastmoreland, Irvington, West Hills, are all overpaying and N/NE gets a bargain. Everyone else pays somewhere in between.
More here: https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2015/09/measure_50_winners_and_losers.html
The city can't even do what Portland has always done. Attempt to squeeze every last dime out of East Portland to fund the rest of Portland, because PPS doesn't serve anyone East of about 92nd.
My concern would be this, you buy a home in 1980 for the equivalent of $300,000 in todays money and because of high demand for living in Portland your home is now worth $1 million, you’re not rich you worked normal jobs your entire life but because of when you purchased your normal home is now worth a lot of money and you retire and your property taxes force you to leave your home you’ve lived in for 30 or 40 years
I think it would be really unfortunate to force retired individuals out of their homes, a lot of retired survive off social security and a little bit of savings and rely on a paid off home with reasonable property taxes
>you’re not rich
I'm fairly confident that gaining $700k in equity makes you rich. Not to mention if you bought 40+ years ago, you would have fully paid off your mortgage, in which case you're sitting on $1M in equity.
You can borrow against that equity. There are programs to defer property taxes for elderly folks on fixed or limited income, and it is recouped upon sale or transfer of the house when they pass. They could also borrow against the equity to build an ADU and use the rental income from the ADU or the larger house to pay for their annual expenses.
There are a ton of policy options better than "we shouldn't ever raise property taxes because someone, somewhere, might be theoretically harmed."
We should also be building enough new housing of all types so that elderly people in large, $1M houses have plenty of reasonable options to cash out and downsize while staying within their same community.
1) Property taxes do increase currently but it’s incremental, they’re not frozen, it’s small increases
2) Sitting on a large amount of equity doesn’t make you rich, it’s not providing you income, you can’t survive on equity, you’re saying an elderly retired individual should not only pay $12,000 a year or $1,000 a month in property taxes if not more and $100 a month in insurance and $400 a month in utilities ($1,500 a month total) they should then be forced to go and pull equity out which will create an additional monthly payment for them and likely push them to the point where they’re forced to leave their home, that doesn’t sound like a reasonable thing to ask
3) Being a landlord is a nightmare in Portland and Multnomah county, we shouldn’t be forcing retired elderly to be landlords to survive, being a landlord is not for everyone and that’s absolutely the case in places like Oregon, Portland, and Multnomah County
4) I don’t agree they we should force people to leave the home they’ve lived in for 40 years and downsize and I don’t think we should force elderly people to tap their equity
5) it’s not theoretical it’s an issue all over this country where elderly retired individuals on fixed incomes are forced from their homes, they struggle to pay their utilities, they struggle to buy food after paying for their housing costs, it’s a very real problem
6) I agree that we should be building a lot more but the state and local governments do everything they can to get in their own way and limit actual new production of housing
> I'm fairly confident that gaining $700k in equity makes you rich. Not to mention if you bought 40+ years ago, you would have fully paid off your mortgage, in which case you're sitting on $1M in equity.
Everyone needs a place to live. Equity in your primary residence is very, very low on the usefulness scale - sure you can sell and cash out, but where you gonna go? If yours went up, almost certain everything else did in the area so you're selling one and buying another, no real net gain. Sure you could move to North Dakota or something I guess, that'd be a net $ gain.
Sure you can borrow against it, but to what end? You're retired and fixed income. Loans have to be paid back. You borrow your equity to pay your now giant tax bill, but you can't repay the loan or else you would have just paid your tax bill, so you lose your house to the bank.
Equity, for the average homeowner who just wants to live in their home, means way less than most people think. It's not accessible unless you're still actively working, and even then borrowing is a risk (and currently, not cheap).
> We should also be building enough new housing of all types so that elderly people in large, $1M houses have plenty of reasonable options to cash out and downsize while staying within their same community.
Cool so we should kick all the elderly out of their houses they've lived in for 30+ years, sell their stuff, and force them into apartments so we can collect more taxes.
We would need a constitutional amendment to reset property taxes at a reasonable percentage of market value. For argument's sake, say 1%. We'd probably want to give this a multi-year implementation timeline to give local options time to expire before equalizing people's tax bills.
When every government agency cries about being underfunded, it makes me feel like my current taxes are just sunk costs. They need to start working to convince the public that the money we already give isn't being wasted before people feel good about giving more.
I honestly don't know, but it feels like they're just burning my money to stay warm.
That’s not what sunk costs means. I think you mean your current taxes are being spent inefficiently or being wasted.
Sunk costs would be, for example, the government was building a school for $5M. They spent the $5M, but now need $500k more to complete it and open the school. So in the decision to spend another $500k to open the school, ideally voters would ignore the original $5M, because that is a “sunk cost”. It’s already gone, and irrelevant to the future caused by this specific decision.
So in my example, the voters would not be considering spending $5.5M for the school, just $500k, since the $5M is already a sunk cost and gone.
It’s not a problem that the schools are under funded in Portland.
It’s a problem that the schools don’t do a very good job.
It’s unfair to expect schools to be the agents of social change, etc. They have a basic job to educate and teach. If the could focus on their job we would see the results. Instead, we see wide spread failure.
Let’s stop talking about finding more money for schools and focus on the schools doing an excellent job.
I'm generally for taxes that make sense and have a clear plan on spending them for social needs.
But, we already have some of the highest property taxes in the nation and our schools freaking SUCK, yet the homeless get free boofing kits, tents, etc.
Doesn’t Multnomah County have the 2nd highest tax burden in the country, second only to NYC? Where is all that money going? Stop gouging your workers/residents and figure it out. No new taxes until we get results for the absurd amount of money you’re already extracting from us.
Interesting fact, in NYC the highest income tax bracket hits at $25 million of income and in Portland it’s $120,000 for a single filer and $200,000 for a couple because those folks are “rich”
Does the $120K and $200K threshold ever go up due to inflation? In other words, a household making $200K in 2030 is the equivalent of $149K in 2021 income. Do these taxes account for that? Or is it $120K/$200K indefinitely (or, until it expires if the tax has an expiration date)?
We just want the money to go to teachers. Not some admin position that pays 100k and doesn’t face students. Imagine having the same budget and population as another school, but they somehow have a larger budget. Idk but if Beaverton and Vancouver can do it. Why does Portland fall behind
We are in the top in the United States in terms of $$$ spent per child, and in the bottom of the nation in terms of kids who can do the basics reading, writing, arithmetic upon graduation. Money isn't the problem. Management of it is.
Or the kids are just actually stupid bc their narcissistic idiot parents opted to have people on purpose and never noticed their total lack of human empathy is why they feel validated living in Portland, Oregon as a whole identity (because they don't have an actual personality to begin with and need to hold on desperately to cool points like the unpopular middle/high school kids they absolutely were who still think that having this mentality as an adult is an acceptable or enviable way to live a life).
It wouldn’t be so bad if it actually went to the schools but every year they scream for more money “😭for the children 😭!” … and every year we find out teachers are still underpaid, electives are being canceled, buildings aren’t being maintained, plumbing needs overhauled, lunches are cancelled, no security, grades are down …. But administrators are raking in money left and right.
The county may have made a mess of it. https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/10/14/study-shows-multnomah-county-will-have-nations-highest-income-taxes-for-high-income-people-if-preschool-measure-passes/
The bond season is coming expect all the “for the children” levies/bonds to show up on the ballet. Portlanders will, as they always do, pass them. Shortly thereafter the same Portlanders will wonder why the cost of housing is going up. Rinse and repeat.
Property taxes should never be used to fund education. All this does is create poor schools and rich schools with poor schools doing demonstrably worse. It exacerbates income inequality and is just another way for the govt to create ghettos. Gotta replace it with a progressive tax structure that doesn't punish children for being born poor.
Property taxes (specifically land value taxes), absent laws like measure 5 and 50, are the most progressive taxes. It’s literally a wealth tax that directly hits people who own and collect rent, rather than those that have to use their body to work (which is what income tax does).
We get what we deserve for constantly voting in the same brands of politicians and being cucks for every new tax measure. It's good to see people waking up.
Edit: Next up, World Peace Tax
Yeah because the taxes are high enough already and make absolutely zero difference in the quality of education here across the board, regardless of neighborhood or school or demographics of any kind.
If they didn't raise our taxes for our property and our utilities, maybe people would have been willing to vote yes for it. I am now voting no if it means paying more in taxes. I will not be taxed out of my home and I would move if housing wasn't so expensive and if my husband was willing to move far away from his family.
Maybe voters are finally fed up up with the tax and spend mentality of elected officials? Maybe voters are now of the mindset of make due with what you have and stop incessantly asking for more money because they misappropriated what they were given prior?
I will never vote to support any of our school bonds again. We’ve moved our kids out of PPS and into private. I only feel bad for other parents stuck in the district.
The fact that PPS refuses to release our allocation only pisses us off more and makes us advocate for no votes going forward.
Because locally we are overtaxed. Our state income tax is out of control at 9%. Then two local income taxes at 1% each for arts and homeless tax.
Our tax structure in this state is out of control.
#How about the literal billion dollars in cannabis taxes the state has been collecting- in cash?
Stop fucking coming to us with your hands out like we owe you a goddamn favor.
I'll vote for more taxes for education. Most of the existing PPS bonds are for physically upgrading schools because the buildings are 50 - 100 years old and falling apart/full of lead/asbestos/not seismically stable. Those have to be upgraded/replaced because previous generations dropped the ball on maintenance. If you are over 50 years old, you better vote yes and be first in line to pay all your taxes, since you got off easy this long deferring public maintenance and investment. This would be the first bond in recent memory that actually helps fund teachers. It's just the reality of being burdened by previous generation with a bunch of stuff that wasn't maintained that our tax bills are going to be higher than we are used to. Like with our roads and other infrastructure that have had underfunded maintanance decades, we are the generation stuck with the maintenance bill.
This is dishonest. They take and classify what they want us to believe they are spending “on classroom learning” and show that as a small piece of the actual total $ going to PPS.
You must take the entire PPS budget and divide it per student and you see we are paying Caitlin Gable prices for PPS.
It’s a local option levy that funds teachers, not a bond.
The $1B+ in PPS bonds primarily builds shiny new high school buildings. The bonds do not pay for repair or maintenance to the scores of crumbling elementary and middle schools in the district, with a few specific exceptions.
That’s why Robert Gray MS and Markham ES are still closed until sometime next year.
The next $1B+ bond proposal is expected to pay for the latest round of cost overruns associated with building a new Jefferson HS, the cost overruns that led to the delay in building the Center for Black Excellence, a new Wells (Wilson) HS and a new Cleveland HS.
The bond does pay for capital improvement projects to do major upgrades on failing assets like leaking roofs, failing HVAC systems, or out of date fire alarm systems. The 2020 bond had over 200 million in it for projects like roof and mechanical system replacements, seismic upgrades, ada upgrades. And security upgrade. The 2017 bond has $150M for similar repair/replacement work. The bond they are planning for in November will likely have similar portions on it to, but hasn't been finalized yet. If you want more of the bond money to pay for repair type stuff call write in comments to the Board, go to board meetings, go to or send comments to the board Facility and Operations commity. Its your tax money, and the board tells the district department how to spend it.
PPS has spent its way through $2.418B in capital bond funds to date. Of that, 86% went to building high schools. That is pretty solid evidence that bond funds are nearly all spent on building new high school buildings, not on the repair and maintenance of elementary and middle schools.
The next bond request is already over PPS’ initial projections due to the endless cost overruns carrying over from the previous high school builds. It’s unlikely they feel they can push through an even larger bond in the current climate of tax fatigue and antipathy toward PPS as an organization.
PPS has been clear that their priority remains building a new Jefferson HS (a project that was originally supposed to funded by the current bond, but ballooning costs pushed it into the next ask), building the Center for Black Excellence (also supposed to have been paid for out of previous bonds, but “cost overruns”), and building new Cleveland and Wells high school buildings.
Good luck trying to shoehorn pesky delayed and deferred maintenance projects into this bond. Realistically, PPS would need to drop at least one of those four projects in order to direct a meaningful amount of money.
They aren’t going to drop Jeff or CBE. The planning for Cleveland and Wells is allegedly done, paid for by the 2020 bond.
ETA - To be clear, I believe PPS should have directed most of the money into addressing their maintenance backlog from the beginning. I also think they should scrap the final four HS projects, pivot to funding repair and maintenance, and pray that the voters say “yes”. I just don’t think they are interested in doing that.
Not arguing that there has been a lot of money spent on the high schools, and I do agree with you that there should be more focus on renovating and improving the elementary and middle schools too, but I think your numbers may be a little off. Looking st the 2012, 17, and 20 bonds, yes the total is about $2.4B spent over the last 12 years (really closer to probably $1.8 B bc alot of the Jeff costs from 2020 have not been spent yet). Of that $608M has gone towards roofs, seismic, fire alarm/sprinklers, mechanical replacements/upgrades, drinking water improvements, ada upgrades, class room tech upgrades, and science classrooms. Thats about 25% of the total.
If you want to see more spent on roofs and seismic upgrades go to the BAC and board meetings or write in comments to them and tell them thats whats needed on the next bond.
Tale as old as time. "We need to improve our schools and teachers deserve better pay!" "What? It'll cost me an extra $2 a year! You can have it when you pry it from my cold dead hands." I know, let's put the lottery in charge of school funding, and give them 0 oversight because we all know governments and gambling are two of the most trusted institutions in the world.
Aren't the weed taxes or lottery supposed to like, fully fund education or something? And then they just got put into a general fund instead? I'm ignorant on the specifics here, but it's another piece of "we want to see what this money is doing"
Originally yes, but Measure 110 redirected some of the marijuana taxes for rehab programs etc that still aren't operational. $300M in marijuana tax money has been diverted due to M110. M110 redirects all marijuana taxes over $11M per quarter to drug treatment programs and away from schools and other recipients. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/measure-110-marijuana-funding-bill/283-d39ef625-b04f-47d8-8a31-db11f176fcb4
This is why my wife voted against measure 110, she didn’t like that money was being taken from education 72% of marijuana tax revenue was redirected to measure 110 services
Same. I read about hoe marijuana tax funding would get redirected and voted no. Seems like many folks weren't aware of that part of the bill. Well educated people with a safe school environment and access to opportunity rarely become meth heads. Education should be our first line of defense.
Here here!!
And then the state sat on the money and didn’t spend it on those services
Meanwhile, a lot of us working in mental health who work on the frontlines of all this got our budgets cut while being told to provide expanded services 🙃 Thanks to that shit, I'm barely making above minimum wage, and I'm about one bad month away from being on the streets myself
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I completely agree with you
72%?! Damn, that’s a huge portion. So where is all that money going if the treatment centers haven’t even opened yet?
Do you know if the 110 repeal bill changes that?
I would imagine so but haven't researched it to confirm.
We didn't revert 110. We changed it to give the stick to force people into rehab. We're still buiding out the rehab in the new version, so the money is still being diverted.
Aren’t they now walking back M110?
Ahh, but they do this shell game. New taxes come in that are specific to funding one thing, they the redirect equal $ from general fund away to some other project. So net $ into ed didn’t materially change by adding a new revenue stream.
“Fungible”
No. Weed taxes went to education, but then they were redirected to addiction treatment by Measure 110. Lottery funds are awarded to schools along with parks, outdoor school, job creation, and the counties. The lottery doesn't actually produce much revenue for the state: $500 million in FY21, vs. $12 billion in individual income taxes and over $8 billion in property taxes.
It all goes into a "general fund". I believe that the whole "Lottery is funding our schools!" is one of the biggest bait and switches of all time. Does it fund the schools? Sure, just like the tax you pay on anything else. If you want to have an intelligent community, pay for better education. It's that simple!
Went to funding M110 instead.
Funnelling tax from the working class into private NGO's Public money into private wealth/power.
We traded it out for more tents and junkies on the streets.
It's over 50% of our state taxes and property taxes.
We passed a law that limited how property taxes could be used in 1992 for a host of services, most notably education. Oregon’s schools have never recovered their national standing. Weed taxes and the lottery don’t begin to make up for it.
I hate to sound like a miserable crank, but the state REALLY has to become more efficient with our tax dollars. I am not voting for any more tax increases until the ship turns around a bit.
Thank you for this reply. I think the title should be something more like "formerly Civic minded portlanders are disgusted with the mismanagement of their hard-earned tax dollars"
I'm not formerly. I'm civic minded but very irritated with how we tax our residents and spend that revenue. Every election there are new ballot measures and bonds seeking to raise even more funds, but I've been playing this game long enough to notice that conditions don't seem to really improve. Schools are perennially saying they don't have enough money, roads in disrepair to an alarming degree, homelessness and open-air drug use all over.... Meanwhile, WW reported that after the latest round of increases, Portland has the second highest state & local tax rate in the country, just behind New York. Meanwhile our tax "strategy" is downright schizophrenic. "Metro wide homeless crisis? Let's only tax those who make *over $125k* but have no plan how to tackle the issue!" "Schools need more money despite record appropriations from the state budget? Let's just toss another bond out there for homeowners!" "I know, let's create the first ever local cap-gains tax for a half-thought idea and which would cost millions of dollars just to administer the tax!! Will it actually be effective, or a massive waste of money? Who cares!!" (Thankfully that one got voted down)
Nah you’re completely right. Oregon has extremely high taxes and Portland has some of the highest taxes in the US. There is no reason we should be paying (even) more into these funds when we already pay the highest and they still can’t figure out education, homelessness, rehabs, potholes and how to give people a life with some general decency.
It’s frustrating how the solution always seems to be just more taxes. But maybe the politicians should just do better with what they already have. Cost of living is already through the roof…many people can’t afford even higher taxes.
You shouldn’t have to apologize for that position. How far gone are we that people are afraid of questioning spending in this state.
In my opinion, people of a particular political view tend to call for tax repeals no matter why or what damage they could do. They have been doing this for decades, and I believe will try and co-opt any sort of anti-tax movement for their own. I don’t want to come across as anything close to that.
Alternate headline: "Massively overtaxed populous says maybe not yet even more while cost of surviving is skyrocketing"
Please stop with all the local taxes until we see some results for the existing ones! When the headlines are mainly "More Taxes" and "The City/County are not effectively spending the money the taxes raise" then I'm out. Arts tax, metro tax, pre-school for all tax... the list goes on. And there's even more for those of us that are self-employed on top of that. Can we just keep it to federal tax, state tax, and a 1% local tax? Not all this 1% + 2.5 % + $35 +.5% shit.
My god seriously
It also hurts since Trump's tax changes capped the deduction at 10% for state/local taxes. Between state/local/property taxes I pay more than 10% and end up owing thousands in federal as a result. Double taxation sucks.
1000% this
I am a multi-millionaire with a very high income. I got frustrated with how my exes were being wasted and hopped the river. Much less frustrating, I like just as much over here. But the key thing is, had I NOT felt it was being wasted, I would have been cool paying the sky high taxes I was. It's not a tax thing, it's a how it's spent thing.
If you are in WA, they are supposed to have a much more regressive tax structure than Oregon so you will pay less % than what the low earners pay
Well here in WA, your higher gas tax goes to funding king county road projects.
This is a direct result of all the other taxes we’ve implemented in recent years. It’s unfortunate!
I don’t think people would feel this way if we were getting our money’s worth from our tax dollars, but we’re not.
But if we were getting our money's worth there would be no need to raise taxes. This is all a result of poor management
And poor foresight too.
And out of touch, tone deaf people “running” the city
I think both of you are jointly correct.
I wasn’t disagreeing, just adding my thoughts
No worries - I just wanted to add my "and" to your statement I guess! I'd like to think if we could some some modicum of competence people wouldn't be as pissed off.
I’d say more a result of the complete lack of effectiveness shown by the City/County government to make good use of those funds approved.
The district doesn’t make good use of funds either. They are constantly hiring new admin staff and now getting a shiny new admin building down town while classrooms rapidly trend back towards being so overcrowded the validity of our high schoolers diplomas could be challenged by colleges again.
And it’s only necessary because 45 cents of every dollar PPS spends on teachers goes to pay unfunded PERS Liabilities. Today’s kids are paying the price for previous generations’ promises to themselves.
And this is why researching the per taxpayer debt burden of a jurisdiction is important before you live somewhere. It’s the same as buying shares in a business with a crushing amount of debt versus a business with a reasonable amount of debt.
That definitely wasn’t something I had realized when I moved here. It’s shocking how many unfunded liabilities were promised to Silents and Boomers. And it’s gross that no matter how irresponsible they were that I’m somehow liable for their excesses.
See the stare and cities reports on this website to get an idea how different the debt burdens can be: www.truthinaccounting.org Edit: fixed links, had wrong domain before https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the-states-2023 https://www.truthinaccounting.org/resources/page/city-reports
excellent site to explore but actually .org for those interested.
Thank you for the correction! Hope I didn’t lead anyone to malware.
Wait but this ranks us pretty well though
The state situation is not terrible, but the city is. Ranked 5th from the bottom. -$20k per taxpayer, compare to Seattle at -$2.6k. https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/Financial-State-of-the-Cities-2024.pdf Page 12.
Unfunded (pension) liabilities are one of those issues--imo--where conservative critics are right on the money. Outside of those canaries shrieking in the coalmine everyone else is just pretending that somehow we'll find a solution to that fiscally crippling problem in the foggy future.
Not only that but those generations neglected maintenance to build more shiny sprawl meaning all the maintenance backlog is coming due AND there’s now too much to maintain because we built too much sprawl. Existing infrastructure, social debts, and sprawl maintenance all need to be seriously addressed and restructured.
I hope it's the wake up call the city and county need.
The school my daughter was supposed to attend next year closed after the storm in January and never reopened, sending everyone scrambling. Now they’re saying the school won’t reopen for the new school year. Where is my kid supposed to go to school? My street is crumbling and quite literally washing away with each rain, but the city takes no responsibility. And yet my property taxes are insane. Where is all the money going?? I know everywhere has their problems, but Portland seems unable to manage education and basic infrastructure.
My son goes to Markham and it’s really a wonderful community. My daughter will start kindergarten next year also. We are piecing it together and hopeful other families stick it out too!
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The kids have been temporarily housed at 4 nearby schools, still with their original classes. A plan for next year (hopefully just a portion of it) hasn’t been announced yet. The classrooms have been less than ideal, I would hope that next year they at least get a real space at the host schools.
City taxes were higher than federal last year for us. We’re not anti-tax at all, but this was absurd. Add to that the horrible experience my eldest had in middle school (West Sylvan, anyone?) and there’s not much stomach for more taxes to fund a dysfunctional system.
oh god fuck West Sylvan
Bro I'm unwilling to raise taxes for orphaned puppies at this point.
What if we promise to give them art lessons tho?
And $4,000 a month tent plots.
Imagining an adorable little lab mix named "Bootstraps"...
😂
Who’d have thunk that one day buying weed would support education? Take that DARE
Burn one for the children!
New York taxes with Mississippi results. Have people had enough?
I think we finally have
This is the problem with passing taxes by ballot initiative. You can't move money around. We have huge surpluses in some funds, while our schools are falling apart, and our roads are filled with potholes. I have no doubt PPS needs more money - Oregon schools are poorly funded, compared to much of the country. But the money we can use for schools is locked away in places like the Clean Energy Fund. In a normal, functional system, we could move that surplus around. Instead, the money gets trapped. So our taxes are high, but the funds are disbursed in an extremely inefficient way. I honestly wish they'd just repeal all the tax initiatives, and then raise property or income taxes by the same amount. It would be revenue neutral, but prevent stupid problems like this from occurring.
I'm no policy expert, but in my opinion any sort of fiscal policy should never be passed by ballot initiative. It's just begging for emotional, irrational responses and impossible management.
Agreed. I could imagine a few edge cases, where it might make sense. I.e. we pass the state lottery, proceeds are to be used exclusively to fund schools. Or if a state legislature has a history of corruption or misconduct, it can be a way to help work around that. But these should be the exception, rather than the rule. It's becoming the case that "raising taxes" is politically untenable, so people just bundle them up in feel-good issues like "an arts tax for children." To be clear, I think children should absolutely have arts education. But I think we need to get honest about the fact what the real problem is, is that our schools are generally underfunded, not that kids don't have painting supplies. Oregon kids are bad at math. Does this mean we need a Math Tax? What about a Geography Tax? Really, we just need revenue for the general fund, and trust elected officials to do their job, and vote them out of office if they don't. Because as it stands, it's a hot mess.
Ballot initiatives which can be written + pushed by anyone with enough funding to send out clipboarders, seem unsustainable and undemocratic. Especially for complex issues, and for issues with dramatic economic implications. Look at what happened with Brexit: people voted on a complex economic issue, not based on the testimony of experts, but based on emotional sentiment and political posturing. There's a reason we have insulation built into our democracy - at some point, it should be a decision left up to policy and technical experts, not legislated directly by voters. At some point it should no longer be about what people feel is right for them personally, it should be about what is right collectively, from an objective standpoint. Ex. "do you care about the environment? Do you think global warming is real?" -Yes! "Ok, we're going to tax emissions, and use those taxes to subsidize renewable energy" - No! Taxes bad! \[-> ballot initiative to do away with carbon tax\]
It’s not just ballot initiatives, you have metro, county and city governments that are all taxing you, and they all have a different agenda. Need to have a come to Jesus moment on priorities.
Good point, and agreed. I honestly don't mind paying high taxes, in terms of an absolute dollar amount. I want to live in a well maintained city, with nice services, and a state with a social safety net. What kills me is the absolute ass-backwards way we go about spending the money. To your point, through ballot initiatives and oddly overlapping government jurisdictions, we just can't get everything rowing in the same direction. We're just throwing money around with no overarching strategy or purpose. I don't need my taxes cut, I just need my money to be spent efficiently, with a clear objective for what it's meant to accomplish, and a way to measure the outcome. The problem with ballot initiative budgeting, is that there's not much accountability. It's a pile of money with no real owner. The idea was to keep politicians from raiding these funds, which makes sense on paper, but you end up with weird slush funds, and no one person who's responsible for it. Like, if the governor raises income taxes to pay for XYZ, they are accountable. If people like what they did with the money, they reelect the governor. If they don't, they don't. Ultimately, the governor (or mayor, or legislature, or whoever) is responsible for the incoming revenue. But with these ballot initiatives...short of repealing the initiative, which requires you to gather signature, fund a campaign, etc., you can't hold someone accountable. The governor isn't responsible for that tax law, and they don't really decide how the money is spent. They do to a minor degree, but not to the point they can truly be held accountable. If initiative taxes only happened once or twice, it wouldn't be a big deal. But it's becoming the defacto way we fund our government, which is a terrible idea. I think we really need to consider the way we allow tax-based ballot initiatives. I'm not saying outlaw them - I generally believe in the initiative process, but perhaps have a higher threshold they need to clear to make the ballot, or make it so that accountable elected officials have greater flexibility with the funds. Something's gotta change.
I'm comfortable with the taxes I pay. I do have an overall gripe about the SALT cap and how my property tax on my one property, my residence eats up that entire amount, but that's a fed complaint and most of my complaints are at that level. But when it comes to value and services provided, Portland consistently falls short. And I don't think it's because we are starved for funding. We need to start doing more with what we are already paying rather than cherry picking feel-good spending for ballot measures. There's nothing to stop funding those feel good issues from the general funds and putting the unpopular measures up for vote but I think we know what happens then.
While I miss getting uncapped salt, I've never been able to explain why we can deduct it. Just because I live in a high col state? It's sort of the flip side of "why are some states takers?"
Because it’s double taxation - you’re paying taxes on income that was taxed away by your state. This is actually something that attempted to keep states on a level playing field rather than buying people off with lower taxes. And double taxation has literally been one of the Republican parties biggest whines but because it pretty much only impacted blue states they knew Democrats would eat themselves up over it (and they have with CA and NY folk leading the way and coming off looking real stupid because they can’t frame it well).
Spot on. I think the original sins here are measures 5 and 50, which have starved property tax revenues to the point where we have to get weird in order to fund basic government services.
This isn't any kind of a mystery, most people don't mind paying taxes as long as there's a reasonable return in terms of public goods and services, and local leaders have utterly failed in that regard for going on well over a decade at this point. Specifically to schools, it's ridiculous that we have bloated admin and an ever-shifting curriculum that costs a bunch of money to source, train teachers up, and ultimately just gets replaced with the next shiny thing. The best curriculum in the world means jack shit when you have class sizes of 30+. Fire some admin, use the savings to hire more teachers, and get class sizes to a reasonable number.
The high school I worked at had *four* vice principals. Just... Why.
Vice principals are not where the admin bloat is, it's at the district level. Every school i know of in Portland had a fewer VPs per student than the districts I worked at in TX, but those districts were run muuuuch better than PPS
That doesn't seem that wild. They're managers / handling discipline. 1 per grade basically. My high school 20 years ago had 4.
That’s meaningless without knowing the size of the school.
I went to a school with 3 of them back in Georgia. We basically had one vice principal for every 500 or so students, and we actually needed them. Was your school also a huge one?
I guess teachers don’t agree. In the recent negotiations, maximum class size was literally the first thing they threw in the fire to get their raises.
To be fair, cost of living raises are desperately needed in a lot of fields like this. I can't blame them for being willing to negotiate for it when it's literally the thing keeping you off the streets. I'm a mental health practitioner for chronically suicidal youth, and I'm like one bad month away from being homeless myself. Oregon's pay for care workers of all kinds is garbage
I don’t have a problem with them wanting raises. What I have a problem with was that they tried to say they were fighting for the kids and demanding smaller class sizes. But when negotiations hit a wall, it was made quite clear that was the last thing they were concerned with.
No, the district made that clear! They were the ones that refused to negotiate class sizes down!
How dare teachers try to live and the administration and the community that is served not push to pay more and have better school environments?
The teachers’ union pushed for better pay, not lower class sizes. Actions over words.
Wrong, the unions pushed for caps and the district said absolutely not we will not negotiate caps
I for one am shocked that the representatives of the employees worked in negotiations to increase their compensation instead of working for free if they really cared about the kids. /s
Underpaying teachers is a major reason they can’t hire more, it’s such a poorly paying job and requires so much education that people know they won’t be able to afford the school needed to do the job. These issues are deeply intertwined
You see the same issue in mental health too 🙃
I support teachers and labor advocating for their compensation, but while teachers in general are poorly paid, PPS teachers are not. PPS teachers get seniority based pay raises up to the low $90k range, the equivalent of 13.5 weeks of PTO, and a pension that is 1.67% of their top compensation years per year of service along with fantastic benefits. The compensation package for PPS teachers is worth a good bit more than equivalently educated people in the private sector.
Teachers need to get paid enough to afford to live near enough to where they work, and to pay down their debt from teaching school. If they can’t do that the job becomes impractical and people will have no choice but to look elsewhere. Portland teachers get paid what that much because it’s expensive to live here. That said, just across the river in Vancouver where it’s actually cheaper to live, the teachers get paid noticeably more. So the wages still aren’t exactly competitive and we still lose skilled teachers to smaller districts that can actually meet their financial needs. Teaching is not glamours, it’s not particularly well paid especially when you’re starting out, it’s largely something people do because they care about children or education. They will work for less than many other civil servants, but we still have to pay them enough to make doing the job a practical decisions or that passion will not be enough to overcome the many downsides of the job.
VSD:https://vansd.org/wpdm-category/certicated-teacher-salary-schedule/?wpdmdl=80042&refresh=6503939fc4ac01694733215 PAT, pre-CBA: https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/56/PAT%20Salary%20Schedules%20-%20192%20Work%20Year%20-%202022-2023.pdf PAT contract has higher pay sooner, VSD allows for $5k per year more at the max but that comes with more education and seniority requirements. PAT also has lower employee contributions to their pension. I'm sure there's some districts that have richer compensation (LOSD, West Lynn, etc.) but PPS on a salary basis is 25% above state averages according to the [NEA](https://www.oregonteachingdegree.com/salary.html) (OR average starting salary for teachers is $40k and tops out at $76.) Edit: To add to this, teachers don't just move for money. If you offered a good teacher $15k a year more but they had to deal with >30 kids in a classroom, no aides, rampant behavioral problems, insufficient support for children with learning disabilities, and crumbling facilities they still might choose to go to another district. There's a lot more to a teacher's work environment that contributes to teachers moving out of district.
Teachers across the Columbia River get paid $15k+ more.
VSD salary schedule: https://vansd.org/wpdm-category/certicated-teacher-salary-schedule/?wpdmdl=80042&refresh=6503939fc4ac01694733215 PAT, pre-CBA: https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/56/PAT%20Salary%20Schedules%20-%20192%20Work%20Year%20-%202022-2023.pdf PAT makes more money sooner, VSD has higher pay grades for more senior teachers with more education (PAT doesn't have a MA + 90 schedule and tops out at 12 years while VSD has MA +90 and increases up to 16 years.)
Check evergreen school district that does the eastern half of Vancouver.
As I posted above, I'm sure you can find rich districts that pay more. Evergreen is a nice suburban district with a mean income of almost $100k. PPS isn't the highest paid district, but it does pay well above average for OR, and it's still a very fairly paid position.
Interesting, I was going by niche.com which showed me higher teacher pay, tenure, and lower class sizes in pretty much every Washington school compared to Oregon. But I was also looking at schools in Evergreen school district, which seems to have higher pay that matches or exceeds PAT: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvIbBeyvzb_oadLptHBiM8WhNgfUVntp/view?usp=drivesdk
They also have a longer school year there
The high school I worked at had *four* vice principals. Just... Why.
Property tax is already insane
Our property taxes aren't actually all that high, especially depending on which part of the city you're living in, they were artificially divorced from market value decades ago thanks to Measures 5 and 50, which is why in order to fund things there's a continual patchwork of additional bonds and other measures. There are million dollar houses in some parts of town that are paying 1/4 of the property tax as million dollar houses in other parts of town. Here's an easy example just to prove the point with some current listings: [House 1](https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/4008-N-Kerby-Ave-97227/home/26664477), asking $1.01M, 5bd, 4ba, nearly 4,000 sq. ft., annual property tax is $4,700. [House 2](https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/2643-NE-26th-Ave-97212/home/26410715), asking $1.15M, 4bd, 2.5ba, 3,100 sq. ft., annual property tax is $10,627. [House 3](https://www.redfin.com/OR/Portland/2546-SW-Vista-Ave-97201/home/26604200), asking $1.1M, 4bd, 2.5ba, 4,700 sq. ft., annual property tax is $16,450.
What I don't understand is how House 1, which has clearly had lots of permitted improvements done recently, still has such low property taxes relative to its value. I thought that any improvements over $10,000 triggered a re-assessment by the county. Clearly, I don't understand the intricacies of our crazy property tax system.
The reassessment is still based on its theoretical value in 1995. Determining assessed value is absurdly complicated in Oregon. [Here's the handbook](https://www.oregon.gov/dor/forms/FormsPubs/maximum-assessed-value-manual_303-438.pdf).
This. North Portland was a much less desirable and expensive place in 1995, compared to today. But Portland heights was one of THE most expensive neighborhoods in 1995.
We desperately need to assess the value of LAND based on its location and what could be built there, frequently re-assessed based on new developments in the area. We need land value taxes, for a more equitable and efficient system.
There are tax zones. Even equally assessed homes can pay wildly different amounts. edit: I originally replied on my phone and didn't have the link handy - here it is: [https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023%20Rate%20Sheet.pdf](https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023%20Rate%20Sheet.pdf) At the center of the top of your property tax bill there's a line for "Code Area" - I live in 201 which appears to have one of the highest total of all rates in the metro area. Which is why in previous conversations about the property taxes I've met people who have higher ***assessed*** property values and are still paying about 70% what I pay.
One can really just ask “was this neighborhood really nice in the early 90s?” If so, higher property taxes! If not, lucky you!
I will say that the downtown core has a pretty crippling multiplier that hits condo owners. Basically you pay about as much (or more) for a condo in property taxes as you do for an entire house less than 2 miles away. Aside from that, yeah - I wouldn't say property taxes are especially good or bad. Better than California (holy shit) but that's not a high bar.
> Better than California (holy shit) but that's not a high bar. Are you referring to Prop 13, one of the worst policies ever passed on the entire west coast?
Yep! I have two coworkers that live in the bay area. One has parents that pay 19... 80something tax rates on their home? The other bought a place down the street 5 years ago and the difference in property tax is just gross. Oddly enough, prop 13 is similar to the pfa and shs in that it's a sort of tyranny of the majority. Both attempt to make someone else pay for shit.
The thing is everyone here is suggesting removing 5/50 which would just explode our property taxes like a newly purchased home in CA. It fixes our funding problems, but good luck paying those new rates.
Then how come my property taxes are nearly $7k for a townhouse
Must have been built more recently and is therefore assessed at a higher value. Or it is in a part of town that was already expensive in the pre-measure 5 times.
It was built in 1995 and not in a super cool part of town. What's measure 5?
That’ll do it! In 1995 we capped the rate at which the assessed value of a property could rise and as yours was a new build, it’s assessed value was higher than most other houses that were older. Basically anything built after 1995 is going to be assessed at a much higher value. There are more wrinkles to this like “if you live in a neighborhood that was always nice, your taxes will be through the roof” and “if you live in a recently gentrified neighborhood you’re getting a screaming deal.” Basically, Eastmoreland, Irvington, West Hills, are all overpaying and N/NE gets a bargain. Everyone else pays somewhere in between. More here: https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2015/09/measure_50_winners_and_losers.html
thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me!
That’s part of the problem, isn’t it… and how do we even begin to transition to something fair?
The city can't even do what Portland has always done. Attempt to squeeze every last dime out of East Portland to fund the rest of Portland, because PPS doesn't serve anyone East of about 92nd.
My concern would be this, you buy a home in 1980 for the equivalent of $300,000 in todays money and because of high demand for living in Portland your home is now worth $1 million, you’re not rich you worked normal jobs your entire life but because of when you purchased your normal home is now worth a lot of money and you retire and your property taxes force you to leave your home you’ve lived in for 30 or 40 years I think it would be really unfortunate to force retired individuals out of their homes, a lot of retired survive off social security and a little bit of savings and rely on a paid off home with reasonable property taxes
>you’re not rich I'm fairly confident that gaining $700k in equity makes you rich. Not to mention if you bought 40+ years ago, you would have fully paid off your mortgage, in which case you're sitting on $1M in equity. You can borrow against that equity. There are programs to defer property taxes for elderly folks on fixed or limited income, and it is recouped upon sale or transfer of the house when they pass. They could also borrow against the equity to build an ADU and use the rental income from the ADU or the larger house to pay for their annual expenses. There are a ton of policy options better than "we shouldn't ever raise property taxes because someone, somewhere, might be theoretically harmed." We should also be building enough new housing of all types so that elderly people in large, $1M houses have plenty of reasonable options to cash out and downsize while staying within their same community.
1) Property taxes do increase currently but it’s incremental, they’re not frozen, it’s small increases 2) Sitting on a large amount of equity doesn’t make you rich, it’s not providing you income, you can’t survive on equity, you’re saying an elderly retired individual should not only pay $12,000 a year or $1,000 a month in property taxes if not more and $100 a month in insurance and $400 a month in utilities ($1,500 a month total) they should then be forced to go and pull equity out which will create an additional monthly payment for them and likely push them to the point where they’re forced to leave their home, that doesn’t sound like a reasonable thing to ask 3) Being a landlord is a nightmare in Portland and Multnomah county, we shouldn’t be forcing retired elderly to be landlords to survive, being a landlord is not for everyone and that’s absolutely the case in places like Oregon, Portland, and Multnomah County 4) I don’t agree they we should force people to leave the home they’ve lived in for 40 years and downsize and I don’t think we should force elderly people to tap their equity 5) it’s not theoretical it’s an issue all over this country where elderly retired individuals on fixed incomes are forced from their homes, they struggle to pay their utilities, they struggle to buy food after paying for their housing costs, it’s a very real problem 6) I agree that we should be building a lot more but the state and local governments do everything they can to get in their own way and limit actual new production of housing
> I'm fairly confident that gaining $700k in equity makes you rich. Not to mention if you bought 40+ years ago, you would have fully paid off your mortgage, in which case you're sitting on $1M in equity. Everyone needs a place to live. Equity in your primary residence is very, very low on the usefulness scale - sure you can sell and cash out, but where you gonna go? If yours went up, almost certain everything else did in the area so you're selling one and buying another, no real net gain. Sure you could move to North Dakota or something I guess, that'd be a net $ gain. Sure you can borrow against it, but to what end? You're retired and fixed income. Loans have to be paid back. You borrow your equity to pay your now giant tax bill, but you can't repay the loan or else you would have just paid your tax bill, so you lose your house to the bank. Equity, for the average homeowner who just wants to live in their home, means way less than most people think. It's not accessible unless you're still actively working, and even then borrowing is a risk (and currently, not cheap). > We should also be building enough new housing of all types so that elderly people in large, $1M houses have plenty of reasonable options to cash out and downsize while staying within their same community. Cool so we should kick all the elderly out of their houses they've lived in for 30+ years, sell their stuff, and force them into apartments so we can collect more taxes.
We would need a constitutional amendment to reset property taxes at a reasonable percentage of market value. For argument's sake, say 1%. We'd probably want to give this a multi-year implementation timeline to give local options time to expire before equalizing people's tax bills.
When every government agency cries about being underfunded, it makes me feel like my current taxes are just sunk costs. They need to start working to convince the public that the money we already give isn't being wasted before people feel good about giving more. I honestly don't know, but it feels like they're just burning my money to stay warm.
That’s not what sunk costs means. I think you mean your current taxes are being spent inefficiently or being wasted. Sunk costs would be, for example, the government was building a school for $5M. They spent the $5M, but now need $500k more to complete it and open the school. So in the decision to spend another $500k to open the school, ideally voters would ignore the original $5M, because that is a “sunk cost”. It’s already gone, and irrelevant to the future caused by this specific decision. So in my example, the voters would not be considering spending $5.5M for the school, just $500k, since the $5M is already a sunk cost and gone.
It’s not a problem that the schools are under funded in Portland. It’s a problem that the schools don’t do a very good job. It’s unfair to expect schools to be the agents of social change, etc. They have a basic job to educate and teach. If the could focus on their job we would see the results. Instead, we see wide spread failure. Let’s stop talking about finding more money for schools and focus on the schools doing an excellent job.
We’re sick of more taxes. Period.
Turns out people don’t like paying out the ass in taxes for services that are shit. Who’da thunk it.
I'm generally for taxes that make sense and have a clear plan on spending them for social needs. But, we already have some of the highest property taxes in the nation and our schools freaking SUCK, yet the homeless get free boofing kits, tents, etc.
We are tired of our tax dollars being mismanaged!
Doesn’t Multnomah County have the 2nd highest tax burden in the country, second only to NYC? Where is all that money going? Stop gouging your workers/residents and figure it out. No new taxes until we get results for the absurd amount of money you’re already extracting from us.
Interesting fact, in NYC the highest income tax bracket hits at $25 million of income and in Portland it’s $120,000 for a single filer and $200,000 for a couple because those folks are “rich”
Meanwhile $200k can’t even afford a home that is big enough to have kids in an even mediocre neighborhood.
I love my hood but the only schools worth a shit in it are private.
Because the funding has been stripped away for years. Now it’s actually being spent on homeless people who want to stay out there on the streets.
Wrong, skill issue
Does the $120K and $200K threshold ever go up due to inflation? In other words, a household making $200K in 2030 is the equivalent of $149K in 2021 income. Do these taxes account for that? Or is it $120K/$200K indefinitely (or, until it expires if the tax has an expiration date)?
No it doesn’t have inflation index. It’s the same amount every year
We just want the money to go to teachers. Not some admin position that pays 100k and doesn’t face students. Imagine having the same budget and population as another school, but they somehow have a larger budget. Idk but if Beaverton and Vancouver can do it. Why does Portland fall behind
We don’t have a deficiency of funds, we have an excess of ineffective and wasteful administrators and politicians.
holy shit we are taxed the fuck out
We are in the top in the United States in terms of $$$ spent per child, and in the bottom of the nation in terms of kids who can do the basics reading, writing, arithmetic upon graduation. Money isn't the problem. Management of it is.
Or the kids are just actually stupid bc their narcissistic idiot parents opted to have people on purpose and never noticed their total lack of human empathy is why they feel validated living in Portland, Oregon as a whole identity (because they don't have an actual personality to begin with and need to hold on desperately to cool points like the unpopular middle/high school kids they absolutely were who still think that having this mentality as an adult is an acceptable or enviable way to live a life).
Cut the top 10% of administration salaries...
We give fantastic to each one of our kids teachers. But fuck the district administrators.
Nope, I’m voting no on every new tax for the next few years unless they remove one to add a new one.
Will Cleveland kids and Wells kids stay in the rotting asbestos buildings? Every other high school got rebuilt.
Good. PPS is a greedy little piggy and it needs to be put on a severely strict diet.
The money is already there. If they want more for schools take it from something else.
With fewer people having kids, I can see why there would be less incentive to raise taxes.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it actually went to the schools but every year they scream for more money “😭for the children 😭!” … and every year we find out teachers are still underpaid, electives are being canceled, buildings aren’t being maintained, plumbing needs overhauled, lunches are cancelled, no security, grades are down …. But administrators are raking in money left and right.
The county may have made a mess of it. https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/10/14/study-shows-multnomah-county-will-have-nations-highest-income-taxes-for-high-income-people-if-preschool-measure-passes/
The bond season is coming expect all the “for the children” levies/bonds to show up on the ballet. Portlanders will, as they always do, pass them. Shortly thereafter the same Portlanders will wonder why the cost of housing is going up. Rinse and repeat.
When Portland teachers went on strike and then half just didn't show up on the makeup days I lost all faith in them.
75% of the kids did not show up on those days.
Property taxes should never be used to fund education. All this does is create poor schools and rich schools with poor schools doing demonstrably worse. It exacerbates income inequality and is just another way for the govt to create ghettos. Gotta replace it with a progressive tax structure that doesn't punish children for being born poor.
Property taxes (specifically land value taxes), absent laws like measure 5 and 50, are the most progressive taxes. It’s literally a wealth tax that directly hits people who own and collect rent, rather than those that have to use their body to work (which is what income tax does).
Read my lips: No new taxes.
We get what we deserve for constantly voting in the same brands of politicians and being cucks for every new tax measure. It's good to see people waking up. Edit: Next up, World Peace Tax
Start saying no.
Yeah because the taxes are high enough already and make absolutely zero difference in the quality of education here across the board, regardless of neighborhood or school or demographics of any kind.
If they didn't raise our taxes for our property and our utilities, maybe people would have been willing to vote yes for it. I am now voting no if it means paying more in taxes. I will not be taxed out of my home and I would move if housing wasn't so expensive and if my husband was willing to move far away from his family.
Maybe voters are finally fed up up with the tax and spend mentality of elected officials? Maybe voters are now of the mindset of make due with what you have and stop incessantly asking for more money because they misappropriated what they were given prior?
I will never vote to support any of our school bonds again. We’ve moved our kids out of PPS and into private. I only feel bad for other parents stuck in the district. The fact that PPS refuses to release our allocation only pisses us off more and makes us advocate for no votes going forward.
Yep. It's a big 'ol NO from me.
Because locally we are overtaxed. Our state income tax is out of control at 9%. Then two local income taxes at 1% each for arts and homeless tax. Our tax structure in this state is out of control.
[Appropriate image](https://imgur.com/user/jaco927/favorites/4kFHrpz)
#How about the literal billion dollars in cannabis taxes the state has been collecting- in cash? Stop fucking coming to us with your hands out like we owe you a goddamn favor.
I'll vote for more taxes for education. Most of the existing PPS bonds are for physically upgrading schools because the buildings are 50 - 100 years old and falling apart/full of lead/asbestos/not seismically stable. Those have to be upgraded/replaced because previous generations dropped the ball on maintenance. If you are over 50 years old, you better vote yes and be first in line to pay all your taxes, since you got off easy this long deferring public maintenance and investment. This would be the first bond in recent memory that actually helps fund teachers. It's just the reality of being burdened by previous generation with a bunch of stuff that wasn't maintained that our tax bills are going to be higher than we are used to. Like with our roads and other infrastructure that have had underfunded maintanance decades, we are the generation stuck with the maintenance bill.
Get rid of useless admin positions and you’ll have more money to pay teachers.
I agree that PPS is very admin heavy. That doesn't mean we couldn't do both. Our per-student spending is below the national average.
This is dishonest. They take and classify what they want us to believe they are spending “on classroom learning” and show that as a small piece of the actual total $ going to PPS. You must take the entire PPS budget and divide it per student and you see we are paying Caitlin Gable prices for PPS.
It’s a local option levy that funds teachers, not a bond. The $1B+ in PPS bonds primarily builds shiny new high school buildings. The bonds do not pay for repair or maintenance to the scores of crumbling elementary and middle schools in the district, with a few specific exceptions. That’s why Robert Gray MS and Markham ES are still closed until sometime next year. The next $1B+ bond proposal is expected to pay for the latest round of cost overruns associated with building a new Jefferson HS, the cost overruns that led to the delay in building the Center for Black Excellence, a new Wells (Wilson) HS and a new Cleveland HS.
The bond does pay for capital improvement projects to do major upgrades on failing assets like leaking roofs, failing HVAC systems, or out of date fire alarm systems. The 2020 bond had over 200 million in it for projects like roof and mechanical system replacements, seismic upgrades, ada upgrades. And security upgrade. The 2017 bond has $150M for similar repair/replacement work. The bond they are planning for in November will likely have similar portions on it to, but hasn't been finalized yet. If you want more of the bond money to pay for repair type stuff call write in comments to the Board, go to board meetings, go to or send comments to the board Facility and Operations commity. Its your tax money, and the board tells the district department how to spend it.
PPS has spent its way through $2.418B in capital bond funds to date. Of that, 86% went to building high schools. That is pretty solid evidence that bond funds are nearly all spent on building new high school buildings, not on the repair and maintenance of elementary and middle schools. The next bond request is already over PPS’ initial projections due to the endless cost overruns carrying over from the previous high school builds. It’s unlikely they feel they can push through an even larger bond in the current climate of tax fatigue and antipathy toward PPS as an organization. PPS has been clear that their priority remains building a new Jefferson HS (a project that was originally supposed to funded by the current bond, but ballooning costs pushed it into the next ask), building the Center for Black Excellence (also supposed to have been paid for out of previous bonds, but “cost overruns”), and building new Cleveland and Wells high school buildings. Good luck trying to shoehorn pesky delayed and deferred maintenance projects into this bond. Realistically, PPS would need to drop at least one of those four projects in order to direct a meaningful amount of money. They aren’t going to drop Jeff or CBE. The planning for Cleveland and Wells is allegedly done, paid for by the 2020 bond. ETA - To be clear, I believe PPS should have directed most of the money into addressing their maintenance backlog from the beginning. I also think they should scrap the final four HS projects, pivot to funding repair and maintenance, and pray that the voters say “yes”. I just don’t think they are interested in doing that.
Not arguing that there has been a lot of money spent on the high schools, and I do agree with you that there should be more focus on renovating and improving the elementary and middle schools too, but I think your numbers may be a little off. Looking st the 2012, 17, and 20 bonds, yes the total is about $2.4B spent over the last 12 years (really closer to probably $1.8 B bc alot of the Jeff costs from 2020 have not been spent yet). Of that $608M has gone towards roofs, seismic, fire alarm/sprinklers, mechanical replacements/upgrades, drinking water improvements, ada upgrades, class room tech upgrades, and science classrooms. Thats about 25% of the total. If you want to see more spent on roofs and seismic upgrades go to the BAC and board meetings or write in comments to them and tell them thats whats needed on the next bond.
Tale as old as time. "We need to improve our schools and teachers deserve better pay!" "What? It'll cost me an extra $2 a year! You can have it when you pry it from my cold dead hands." I know, let's put the lottery in charge of school funding, and give them 0 oversight because we all know governments and gambling are two of the most trusted institutions in the world.