At Diggin’ Livin’, a natural foods store on the main street of Cave Junction, owner Joy McEwen sits at a long wooden table next to a display of homemade wooden beehives.
“Our honey, our candles,” she says. “Our jun, which is like kombucha but it has honey instead of sugar. We really try to have this theme of all things bees.”
McEwen, a self-described hippie, has 600 bee hives in the Illinois Valley. They’re rented out to farmers for pollination and used to make honey and wax products. During our current election year, that’s been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic, the biggest issues that worry McEwen are climate change and helping rural Oregonians stay on their land. Now she’s especially concerned about small businesses and keeping local economies healthy.
“I guess that’s what’s on my mind,” she says, “keeping the economy strong and small businesses strong to be able to be brave enough to open.”
Josephine County, in rural southern Oregon, has the lowest property tax rate anywhere in the state. Over the years, those low taxes have affected basic public services, from bare bones law enforcement to temporarily shuttering the county library. Why residents here have been so anti-tax has as much to do with the county’s timber history as with its residents’ political views.
When residents have supported tax increases, like a rare levy that passed in 2017, McEwen says it feels like they don’t see the benefits in small town Cave Junction.
“Where does it go?” she says. “I would like for it to come back here. Come back right here so we get to feel it.”
Josephine County skews Republican. It’s the county with the lowest permanent property tax rate in the state, at 58 cents per $1,000. For comparison, the permanent rate in Multnomah County is more than seven times that amount. Over the years the hesitance to raise taxes has had tangible impacts on residents’ daily lives. One of the biggest examples is public safety. In 2012, budget cuts shrank the capacity of the county jail by half.
“We were having people tear up their tickets right in front of the police officer because they knew that they wouldn’t be taken to jail at the heart of the crisis,” says Jay Meredith.
Meredith is the president of Securing Our Safety, a Grants Pass community group that advocates for more law enforcement in Josephine County. He’s a registered member of Oregon’s Independent Party. He voted for President Trump in 2016 and plans to do it again this year, since he agrees with the Trump’s economic policies. He says Josephine County's anti-tax attitudes trace back to suspicion about local government.
“There was a lot of trust issues in previous years and that’s mostly at the county level,” Meredith says.
Josephine County Commissioner Dan DeYoung knows this history. He grew up here. DeYoung, is a Republican and plans to vote for President Trump. He says, when he was young, the county had plenty of money because of guaranteed revenue from the sale of timber on federal land.
“We didn’t have property tax back then,” he says. “All the money came from the timber receipts. The board of county commissioners would get done at the end of the year and call the schools and say ‘Hey, you want a couple of million?’ It funded an awful lot of stuff outside of county government.”
But that changed after the timber funds finally dried up in 2012. DeYoung says it revealed how little financial planning there had been and led to the enduring perception of local government being irresponsible.
“So now all of a sudden you look back and say ‘Well, why should I give you any money? You blew all that other money.’ There was a huge distrust in county government, in city government, in government in general,” he says.
“Everything was ‘No.’ Just like any taxes – no,” says Nancy Trahern, chair of the Josephine County Republican Party.
Trahern says in addition to supporting President Trump in the upcoming election, she’s focused on Oregon’s cap-and-trade climate policy and whether it will drive away businesses. With the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering small businesses in Grants Pass and throughout Oregon, she says, she’s even more focused now on candidates who will help people get back to work.
“That’s going to be a bigger issue [for candidates] I think. Are you going to help small businesses? Are you going to be friendly to small businesses? Especially wanting to attract small businesses here in Oregon instead of making people want to leave,” she says.
For Doug Walker, a retired contractor in Grants Pass, the lack of housing is the biggest problem in the county.
“Businesses can’t find employees,” he says. “They can’t find employees because the employees can’t find a place to live or they can’t afford what’s here. So, it’s a giant anchor on our economy.”
Walker usually votes democratic. These days he volunteers with Foundry Village, a project building tiny homes for the county’s homeless population. As for the anti-tax sentiment, he says, residents were reluctant to pay taxes after the timber money disappeared. And that attitude has attracted new residents who are also anti-tax.
He believes the portrayal of all taxes being bad is misleading.
“It feels emotionally like, yeah, if I paid less taxes, I’d be better off. But in the end, us paying taxes actually makes the society better and makes the community better,” he says. “That makes it easier for people to make a living and have a better quality of life.”
There are no big tax questions on the 2020 ballot in Josephine County. Some residents are looking to next year when the current tax levy will expire and voters will again be asked whether to renew it. But with local governments around the state facing major budget shortfalls because of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s an issue that’s not going away any time soon.
