Portland Metro Council Feb 25th Homeless Ballot Measure Meeting Materials and Notes.

The Portland Metro Council is scheduled to vote on Tuesday to refer a measure to the voters in the May election to impose a 1% income tax on higher earners and a 1% net income tax on business with gross receipts of more than $5M.

I have assembled the ordinances and exhibits into a single PDF file HERE. 

594 Not Yet Used Vouchers Available to Meet Needs Before Any Collection Would Occur; More Vouchers Are Possible This Year.
I did a post on Monday showing that there are 594 unused HUD VASH and Mainstream vouchers that can fill the time gap before any tax collection could begin to occur in 2021.  Full utilization of these vouchers is also important for local housing authorities to be able to compete for an additional $539 Million in HUD funding for these programs that should be competitively awarded this year. 

Revisions to My Estimates of How Many Filers Will be Subject to the Income Tax
I have embedded below and have uploaded a PDF HERE of a revised projection by county of how many taxpayers would be subject to the income tax portion of the referral. 

I made changes to an earlier version of this to reflect that the threshold to determine if a filer is subject to the tax is NOT the AGI level , but the (Oregon) taxable income of the filer.  This reduced the percentage of filers in each income bracket who I project would be subject to the tax since taxable income is lower than AGI.  However for joint filers I increased the percentage of filers above $200K AGI subject to the tax because the tax threshold was reduced from $250,000 to $200,000. 

Where Taxes Paid Will Determine Where Funds are Distributed
The table also shows my projection of the distribution of taxpayers subject to the tax by county. An important new note is that where the taxes are collected WILL be the formula used to distribute the funding.  

My projection is that 59,000 tax filers will be subject to the tax, with 23% from Clackamas, 43% from Multnomah, and 34% from Washington County. That's about 7% of all filers. 

There are likely additional changes and items to note in the revised referral measure and exhibits. It's possible that Metro may post additional materials HERE.  



Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.