Area voters will get to decide this May whether they want to pay extra to maintain the region's publicly-owned natural areas.
The Metro Council voted unanimously Tuesday to send a parks and natural areas maintenance levy to the voters during the spring election. Ballots for that election are due on May 21, 2013.
The proposed rate was set at 9.6 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, meaning the owner of a home assessed at $200,000 would, theoretically, pay $19.20 a year in increased property taxes for the levy.
That won't necessarily be the case all over the region, though, because of compression – a part of Oregon's tax laws that limits how much property tax a homeowner can pay toward operations levies.
Because of those limits, and their possible effects on other governments' budgets, some mayors opposed Metro asking the voters for the levy.
"Some cities would have their ability to raise revenue for vital police and fire protection services substantially limited as a result of having additional regional levies on the books," wrote Hillsboro Mayor Jerry Willey in a Nov. 30 letter to Metro Council President Tom Hughes. He said a group of the region's mayors was unanimous in asking that Metro not put the levy on the ballot next May.
But Hughes disputed that in his remarks on the proposal at Tuesday's council meeting. He said the levy wouldn't affect school budgets and permanent tax rates, and would amount for 1 percent of the total levies on the property tax rolls.
"The impact of this measure is miniscule," Hughes said, adding that the concerns the mayors raised about compression would still be true in the coming years.
"We've had some suggestions from folks that maybe we ought to delay until we know more about what compression is going to do," Hughes said, "or even worse, in terms of sounding like a whole long time for blackberries and ivy to be growing, we should wait until the Legislature solves the problems of local government finance."
Carol Chesarek, a resident of Portland's Forest Park neighborhood, said the mayors' opposition to the proposal puzzled her.
"Many of them have been emphasizing 'jobs, jobs, jobs,' and that's one of the things this measure would do, is create more jobs," she said. "It would be more productive for everyone to work together and go to Salem to see if we can get some legislation to change this compression issue and get it off our plate."
Jobs were also on the mind of Cascade Policy Institute director John Charles, who spoke in opposition of the levy. He pointed to an increase in staffing in some Metro departments in the last decade as the general fund has decreased.
"You could probably cut a few dozen of those positions and shift resources if the natural areas are important," he said.
But Councilor Carl Hosticka, in his last speech from the dais after 12 years on the board, had something other than jobs on his mind when he explained why he supported asking the voters whether to pursue the levy.
After a few minutes talking about his history supporting the bond measures to create the natural areas, he talked about his two-year-old granddaughter, who he often babysits.
"Every day, we talk about what we're going to do that day. And every day she says 'I want to go to the park,'" Hosticka said, appearing to get choked up. "I want her, and all the children like her, to have those opportunities, and quality opportunities in the future."
Metro has bought more than 12,000 acres of natural areas since 1995, when the first of two bond measures to pay for natural area preservation was passed.
Money from the bonds can't be used for maintenance, and staff in charge of the natural areas say they need the money to pay for cleanup of invasive weeds and to further education programs at the sites. Money from the levy would also pay for park operations, to improve access to the natural areas and for community project grants.
Note: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect date for the mayors' letter. It was dated Nov. 30. This version has been corrected.