The Takeaway

Oregon lawmakers convened in Salem this week to receive updates from state agencies and stakeholders on the status of newly implemented laws and initiatives — in many ways, the unofficial start of the legislative summer. The June legislative meetings during election years are usually the most inconsequential, with kids just out of school for the summer and lawmakers wanting to enjoy their freedom before campaigns launch in full swing. While the hearings themselves were relatively tame, an underlying theme ran across most of the week’s discussions: the legislature would rather talk about hard problems than do the hard work required to solve them.

During the 2025 session, the legislature passed a law directing the Legislative Revenue Office to study options for “modernizing” the state’s constitutional property tax system. Since the 1990s, when Oregonians enacted strict taxing limits on local governments and special districts, the legislature has debated efforts to reform the system. In this sense — at least based on the proposals introduced in the past — “reform” is merely a euphemism for raising taxes. After the 2025 law directing the study was enacted, there was a general expectation the legislature, and particularly legislative Democrats, would engage in a statewide conversation alongside local government interest groups on property tax reform.

On Tuesday, the House Revenue Committee acknowledged that, more than a year after the study was initiated, the work has yet to begin. Democrats attributed the slow start to the politics surrounding the transportation funding package, asserting it was impossible to engage in a statewide conversation while the transportation discussions stalled last summer and then proceeded to a failed voter referendum. It was also suggested that Congress’s passage of H.R. 1, Republicans’ signature tax and spending initiative, upended state finances in a way that suffocated the political energy from other discussions. Now, instead of a robust statewide discussion, the legislature is planning to convene a small group of local government stakeholders to write a report. It is a far cry from the plan previously promised.

Similarly, there have been widespread undertones of some lawmakers seeking to pursue a retail sales tax as a potential funding solution to sustain the state’s delivery of public services after the federal government retracted its contributions to programs providing health care and food assistance to low-income residents. And yet, interest alone cannot drive a major tax and policy initiative into existence. In 2019, the legislature enacted the Student Success Act, which included a controversial business gross receipts tax raising more than $3 billion per biennium. For that initiative, the heavy lifting of coalition-building and policy deliberation began more than a year before the 2019 session.

A sales tax will prove more politically challenging than any business tax because it directly runs counter to the affordability problems politicians are trying to address. As U.S. Senator Russell B. Long famously quipped, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree,” a business tax is fundamentally simpler politics than a tax that falls directly on people’s wallets. And, in a world where the threat of a referendum is very real, especially if the topic is a tax that is relatable to consumers, the politics are stacked against a sales tax. Oregonians have rejected sales taxes at the ballot 11 times over the last century and all but one of those measures drew less than 30 percent of the vote. If there is any possibility of a sales tax, it certainly lacks deliberate political momentum. It cannot be wished into existence.

This week also saw a legislative discussion about the energy consumption of data centers — a potent national issue that, in Oregon, became a driving force in two Democratic primary battles. Here again, the politics are in some ways the legislature setting itself up for hardship. Over the last decade, the executive and legislative branches have stood up new clean energy programs and requirements, forcing the transition from conventional energy sources to renewable ones. Setting environmental politics aside — as hard as that might be — renewable energy is not yet cost-competitive or scalable relative to conventional sources. This is especially true in an increasingly online and electrified world. While it is politically convenient to point toward data centers as the root cause of energy costs, prices were already on the rise. That reality, combined with public feelings about artificial intelligence and data centers that are deeply felt and poorly defined, collides with other legislative priorities, like expanding access to symmetrical fiber Internet outside of urban and metropolitan areas.

If there is a theme that ties these legislative politics together, it is the same one driving our national politics: populism is in the driver’s seat and Salem keeps mistaking it for a passenger it can direct. That is the real trap and an easy one to fall into. Governing requires leaders to count their support before they spend it and have the patience to build broad coalitions rather than imagine them. A legislature that flatters itself about its mandate might not lose the argument in committee, but it loses it later, at the ballot, with the public’s trust as the late fee.