Walker & Smith Run for Cover using Bureaucracy Excuse

On January 25th, County administration, directed by the Board of Commissioners (BOC) convinced the Library Advisory Committee to abandon the 1% Income Tax Proposal for backfilling lost revenues from timber receipts.

They did so using three points:

1. It would take the county a year to draft county tax law to accommodate an income tax.

Fact: They have a year. It is now January, and a tax code does not need to be in place until January of 2008. Further, why would the county want to hire a tax attorney to draft tax law until they know what voters want? First, you ask voters if they want an income tax, then, if they do, you hire the appropriate professionals to draft the law.

2. The Oregon Department of Revenue (DOR) has been less than enthusiastic about helping O&C Counties to implement a local income tax.

Fact: Representative Buckley is dropping legislation this week directing the DOR to work with counties willing to help themselves.

3. This hurdle will be addressed in this legislative session—with or without Jackson County helping itself. The Department of Revenue wants 10% of the revenues to collect and enforce a local income tax.

Fact: 90% of $30 million is a whole lot more than 90% of nothing. The DOR knows that a local income tax is deductible on both state and federal income taxes and they want to keep state coffers intact. Ten percent pretty well covers that.

CW Smith and Jack Walker do not want to place an income tax measure before the voters because they’re worried it will pass and they don’t want to be in the library business. Fact is they ran for and were elected to a job that included running libraries. If they do not want to do that, they should not have run for that office.

By convincing the Library Advisory Board to jump from an income tax to a serial levy, the Board of Commissioners effectively moved library closures from their laps and placed it in the laps of library supporters. After all, the BOC can now say that they not only “did something” to fix the problem, but did what the Library Advisory Committee wanted.

But have they done anything?

No. A double majority has never been reached in this election cycle and when the serial levy doesn’t get a double majority, national media will be looking at the voters in Jackson County rather than the BOC as to why.

Jack Walker: Living in the past

The Medford Mail Tribune's Sunday editorial, 1/21/07, carries the following title. Jack Walker: Living in the Past. And that's what our eldest commissioner is doing. Jack is "Stuck in a time warp..." according to the editorial. Read it for yourself.



A question for all of Jackson County's citizens to ponder is: should our elected representatives on the County Commission be attempting to impose their personal vision on the county, to represent the narrow concerns of special interests, to operate without transparency behind closed doors; or, should our elected officials be listening to the county residents, the region's largest daily newspaper, the retired presiding judge of the Superior Court and countless others who are asking for an opportunity to put financial solutions to our problems on the ballot and allow voters to decide? Jack, are you listening?





"...Jackson County desperately needs leadership rather than wishful thinking."
Medford Mail Tribune, Editorial 01/21/07

So what is the real story?

In a recent public hearing held in Jackson County, Oregon, County Commissioner C.W. Smith made a startling disclosure. After telling the citizens of Jackson County that the library system would be closing in April, due to lack of federal timber-revenue replacement funds, Smith seems to imply that the issue is a ruse...a deliberate attempt on the part of Commissioner Smith and his co-hort, Commisioner Walker, to pressure the citizens of Jackson County into giving away precious public resources to private special interests. Listen to C. W. and decide for yourself.

Background Numbers

In May of 1996, Jackson County asked voters to approve a new tax base. At $.74 per $1,000 of assessed value, it updated the previous tax base of 18 cents per thousand established in 1916 and replaced an expiring library levy of 53 cents per thousand. The campaign centered on all county services in the General Fund; libraries, County Health, public safety, parks, and land use.

In one of the early 1996 campaign meetings, Jack Walker spoke to the campaign committee offering both support and insight. He said that although he ran on a no-new-taxes platform, two years on the Board had opened his eyes to the need for a new tax base. It failed by 4%.

Voters polled said they did not trust the county to keep libraries whole and preferred to support two separate levies.

Four months later, voters were offered a new package with the county and libraries separated on the ballot. The county measure passed by 10 points and the library measure by 18 points.
Ironically, the second go-around involved a higher levy than the proposal that had failed just four months earlier. However, the September ballot stipulated how much each entity would receive: 62 cents per thousand for libraries and 28 cents per thousand for other county General Fund services.

Just two months later, in the November election, Measure 47 passed, sweeping all levies into municipal or county tax bases. The historical society’s 22 cents per thousand (established in 1947), the Criminal Levy (approved in 1995) for 63 cents per thousand, and the recently passed library and county levies plus the existing county tax base of 18 cents per thousand all became the new county tax base at just under $2 per thousand.

Since then, the majority of the Board of Commissioners and County Budget Committee have diligently worked to erase the voters’ last directive on property-tax expenditures.

Anatomy of a Financial Crisis

Jackson County has 892 full-time and 149 part-time employees. The total budget for Jackson County in 2005-2006 was $278,341,664.

The central “issue” that faces (and has been facing) Jackson County is the loss of federal O&C dollars. O&C receipts are a subsidy that Congress created in 1937 to compensate Jackson and 17 other Oregon counties for lost tax revenue when the federal government repossessed 2.5 million acres of land from the Oregon & California Railroad.

For decades, O&C funds were so plentiful the County was able to provide many services without relying entirely on property taxes. With the decreasing timber cut and the increasing value of multi-use forest, the County has experienced a dramatic loss of general revenue fund dollars from O&C receipts. This is the money that we use to subsidize many county services like law enforcement, health & human services, juvenile justice, libraries, and roads.

Congress came to the aid of the O&C counties in 1993 by creating a temporary 10-year "safety net" of guaranteed funding to help stabilize the counties while they searched for alternative funding. That process has been ongoing, but alas, has yielded few results.

The safety net expired on June 30, 2004. Our congressional delegation has managed to backfill some of the lost dollars, but not all by a long way.

Safety net funds are guaranteed by the Federal Government, but they also have been declining 3 percent each year since 1994 – an annual reduction of $300,000-$400,000. At the same time, State programs are also declining. So we’re in a financial crisis.

Some sort of federal support is necessary for Jackson County to survive, as a large percent of County land is public. The County can't tax public lands and it must provide access and support services (roads, law enforcement, search and rescue) to these lands, which include National Forests and recreation areas.

Another strain on the County's dwindling resources is the area's growing population, which requires additional resources to keep services at current levels. In the past 15 years, county population has risen dramatically.