Portland Business Alliance Challenge to Proposed Capital Gains Tax Hits Setback

The Portland Company Alliance is on shaky ground as it seeks to problem the ballot title and explanatory assertion for a proposed money gains tax that would fund lawyers for tenants facing eviction.

As WW documented earlier, a group known as Eviction Representation for All submitted a Multnomah County-only ballot initiative in March that would cost a new .75% tax on money gains to fund a new system.

On March 28, the deadline for suggesting modifications to the ballot title that the Multnomah County attorney wrote for the measure, the PBA filed a problem in Multnomah County Circuit Court docket.

Connected: Tenant Advocates Request a New Multnomah County Funds Gains Tax to Pay back for Eviction-Preventing Lawyers. The PBA Pushes Back.

But it turns out that when filing that problem, PBA’s legal professional, Steve Elzinga, did not incorporate sure info. Particularly, in accordance Elzinga’s April 6 letter to the court, “the case caption omitted the price authority.”

The court clerk turned down the filing March 31 because of that omission. Elzinga refiled the corrected challenge about an hour later on. But, he acknowledged in his letter to the court docket, he failed to include things like a include letter to the court conveying that his correction need to be applied to the first March 28 submitting, so the courtroom construed it as applying to the date of March 31. That day is past the deadline for difficult the ballot title and explanatory assertion.

On April 6, Elzinga wrote to the court inquiring that it contemplate PBA’s objections to the ballot title and the explanatory assertion alongside with his argument as to why the deficiencies in his initial filing and correction really should be dismissed.

“The overriding interest in this situation is to provide the court with the possibility to provide the ‘first and final’ assessment of the ballot title drafted by the county legal professional,” Elzinga wrote.

But assistant Multnomah County legal professional Katherine Thomas and Margaret Olney, the attorney symbolizing the main petitioners for the ballot initiative, disagreed with that approach in April 8 letters to the court, expressing a choose must initial determine whether PBA’s problem should really even be considered before weighing the deserves of that challenge. Olney identified as the timeliness of the challenge a “threshold concern.”

PBA and Elzinga have “not stated why necessitating [PBA and Elzinga] to know and comply with the uniform demo court docket policies final results in injustice or hardship, nor supplied any other foundation for disregarding the guidelines of the court docket,” Thomas included in her letter.

A listening to on the issue is scheduled for April 13 at 2:30 pm in front of Circuit Judge Katharine von Ter Stegge.