Monica Samayoa, an environmental reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting, filed a public records request with the city in October for a list of all companies that paid into Portland’s clean energy fund in 2022 and the amount of money each owed that year, according to a complaint filed Monday in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
After the city denied her request, Samayoa appealed the decision to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, which ruled in her favor earlier this month.
Portland officials responded by suing Samayoa and her employer, alleging that the records release would violate a bevy of local, state and federal laws designed to protect taxpayer confidentiality, court documents show.
“The city of Portland takes the confidentiality of all taxpayer records very seriously, be that the taxes of a community member, a small business or larger business,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said last week during a City Council meeting in which he and his commissioner colleagues unanimously signed off on the litigation.
“This is why the city of Portland, like every other taxing jurisdiction across the country, including the state of Oregon, has a code section expressly prohibiting the release of income taxpayer information.”
Government transparency watchdogs, however, slammed the lawsuit as an unusually aggressive attempt to withhold records that the public has a legal right to obtain.
“We deal with more complaints about city of Portland than just about any other entity in the state,” said Rachel Alexander with the Oregon chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Neither she nor other members of the organization could recall a time in recent memory where the city sued a reporter after losing a records appeal, Alexander said.
“Portland has a long history of being resistant to transparency,” she said. “This, unfortunately, fits into that pattern.”
Morgan Holm, OPB’s chief content officer, declined to comment Tuesday.
Portland’s clean energy fund is seeded by a 1% tax on sales transactions, including online purchases, with large retailers in the city. It is intended to finance projects that aim to reduce carbon emissions, create jobs and help vulnerable residents who face some of the most severe impacts from climate change.
The program has generated a whopping $587 million since 2019 — far more than initial projections, financial figures provided by the city show. About 500 companies owed the tax last fiscal year and paid an average of $370,000, the City Budget Office reported in December.
Yet Portland officials refused to provide OPB with the names of individual businesses subject to the local tax or the amount they owed, arguing that such taxpayer information is confidential and shielded from public disclosure under city code, according to court documents.
Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt disagreed in a Jan. 8 ruling. His office determined that Oregon’s public records law superseded the city’s confidentiality provision and that exemptions to the state law did not apply to information sought by the reporter so long as portions of the records were released separately, according to a copy of the ruling.
The district attorney ordered that the city turn over the names of businesses subject to Portland’s clean energy tax as well as the money each owed but “in such a format as to not associate any individual business name with any dollar amount,” the ruling reads.
Along with Portland officials, some of the state’s largest business lobbying groups have decried the decision and backed the city’s move to reverse it, arguing that disclosing the information would not only violate taxpayer privacy but could also have other troubling ramifications.
“To the best of our knowledge, as it’s been stated, should the DA’s decision stand, Portland would be the only jurisdiction in the country where this is allowed,” Scott Bruun, vice president for government affairs at Oregon Business & Industry, said during last week’s council meeting.
“It would set a precedent and path for public records requests for other now confidential taxpayer information managed by the city of Portland,” Bruun continued. “This would be harmful to regional taxpayers of every size and stripe.”
In the lawsuit filed Monday, city attorneys maintain the position that turning over the records would violate city code that prohibits the disclosure of tax information as well as several exemptions in Oregon’s public records law that shield the disclosure of certain personal or financial information.
Additionally, court documents show, the city alleges that the order would violate multiple other local, state and federal codes or statutes pertaining to tax confidentiality, corporate activity and trade secrets.
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