Lawmakers are primed to do the most damage to the will of the people late at night at the end of a legislative session. These secret machinations can occur anywhere—in New York over a decade ago, one frustrated state senator tried and failed to end the practice he labeled “vampire voting”—but in Oregon this year, a bizarre set of circumstances unfolded one summer night just before the state legislature adjourned for 2025.
On June 23, Democratic state senators introduced an amendment to a tax proposal 95 minutes before midnight local time in Salem. The senators responsible for the measure went unnamed in that document except for their point of origin, the Senate Committee on Finance and Revenue. The subject was preschool.
They weren’t aiming to create but destroy. The amendment would have prohibited any county from collecting county income tax revenues for a preschool or early-education program that did not align with state standards. The measure would “not apply to a county that, as of January 1, 2025, had a population of less than 700,000.” Translation: That only applies to one place in Oregon: Multnomah County, home to the state’s largest metropolitan area, population 795,897. Portland is the county seat.
In case the intent wasn’t clear, the state senators went on to specify that the governor and the Board of County Commissioners of Multnomah County had to come to an “intergovernmental agreement” to phase out any program that met those parameters by June 30, 2027. Another amendment, introduced the following day, would have mandated that successful ballot initiatives comply with a specific numeric formula in order to pass.
All this legislatese pertained to the only Multnomah County program that would fit those parameters, Preschool for All.
Five years ago, two county community groups intended to put competing preschool initiatives before voters. Instead, they dropped that strategy and banded together on a ballot measure for a “tuition-free, developmentally appropriate early learning” program. Once launched, it would scale up from serving the children most in need to serving all Multnomah County three- and four-year-olds by 2030.
Property or sales tax hikes are common ways to fund local initiatives, but convincing voters to raise these taxes is a heavy lift.
Most voters nationwide are willing to raise local taxes to fund children’s programs. That proved to be the case in Multnomah County. Funded on a tax on high-income earners, Preschool for All romped at the ballot, winning 64 percent to 36 percent. Today, Multnomah County is the only municipality in the country to pass a high-income earners’ tax to fund an early-childhood education initiative.
It’s not just state senators who wanted the program’s tax mechanism gone. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D) delivered her own salvos against it in an unusual end-of-session flex. After the amendments were offered, Kotek released a bizarre statement criticizing Preschool for All. She pointed out that the group had $485 million in unspent funds, along with “spotty implementation, scope creep, and a line of providers waiting on the other side of stacks of paperwork to serve families while tax dollars continue to be collected. As of 2025, only 11 percent of potential licensed sites are participating, while others are left waiting to participate or opting out.”
After the program’s supporters protested these maneuverings, the state senators’ gambit never came to a vote, and the state House did not see any companion legislation.
That a Democratic governor and members of the legislature would engage in small-d democratic backsliding to unspool a voter-sanctioned program that aims to provide universal preschool for 11,000 children in Multnomah County by 2030 has been a surprising, if not shocking, development in this Democratic trifecta state.
PORTLAND RESIDENT AUGUST WALDRON, a member of Friends of Preschool for All, a community group supporting the program, is a high school teacher working across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. He told the Prospect that the socialization and support children can gain in preschool can make a huge difference all the way through their secondary school years, and he wants voters to be able to weigh in on the program’s progress. “It’s just the quick, silent, minimalistic effort to repeal it that’s really kind of disturbing about indicating who has power and in what way,” he says.
Property or sales tax hikes are common ways to fund local initiatives, but convincing voters to raise these taxes is a heavy lift. The Preschool for All organizers agreed on a more palatable option. They proposed a 1.5 percent tax on annual incomes of $200,000 or more for people filing jointly, and $125,000 for individuals. A tax of 3 percent would apply to people with annual joint incomes greater than $400,000, or $250,000 for individuals.
In 2022, the program opened its doors to 700 children. Today, it serves 2,200 children and expects to see 3,800 kids in September.
The governor’s decision to chime in with very specific issues, such as “unspent funds,” is curious. An April 2025 report by the state’s own auditor originally documented the failure to spend those funds, but also indicated that “the program was designed to save money in the early years to pay for expenses in later years.” Preschool for All had actually saved more than projected, “due to higher revenue and lower expenses than expected.”
“It didn’t seem that the auditor was bringing up anything that was very, very concerning, and should rise to a higher plane to look into,” says Mary C. King, a Portland State University professor of economics emerita who supports the program and co-authored a 2020 Prospect column about it. “There was no misuse of funds or sloppy accounting, or hiring of unqualified people, there was nothing like that.” As for the failure to ramp up with new provider slots faster, King explains that Preschool for All officials opted to roll out the program using “experienced providers with strong track records.”
One persistent critique leveled by groups like Revitalize Portland Coalition (RPC), a “real estate collective” that also includes other businesses and residents, is that high-income earners are leaving the county because of the tax. In its Winter 2023 newsletter, the coalition reported that Multnomah County is tracking the 100 people who pay nearly 20 percent of the tax to determine whether they stay or go. King’s own analysis shows that from 2019 to 2023, the number of residents earning more than $500,000 has increased threefold. State economic data also makes plain that 34 percent of former residents have even moved to places with higher housing costs—costs that may end up negating any tax savings.
At that time, RPC had announced its support for a repeal of the tax, and that it planned to collaborate with “state officials” to end tax increases imposed by local governments in order to “improve” Oregon’s investment prospects. That sentiment could have been what led to the briefly floated late-night amendment in the state Senate, along with Kotek’s comments.
An effort to strike down a similar tax framework supporting children’s programming is under way in Platte County, Missouri, where voters have filed suit against the county commission for declining to implement a one-quarter-cent sales tax for children’s mental and behavioral health that voters passed last November, 56 percent to 44 percent. (Missouri has been working hard to defy voters of late; the state just reversed a paid sick leave measure that passed at the ballot with 58 percent of the vote, while also dumping part of the measure that tied minimum-wage increases to inflation.)
The Children’s Funding Project (CFP), a national children and youth advocacy group that helps communities with public financing, assisted the Multnomah County ballot initiative organizers. “It sets a really dangerous precedent to subvert the will of voters, particularly when using arguments that don’t or a narrative that doesn’t line up with the actual facts of the situation,” says CFP co-founder Olivia Allen. “These are complex programs that require massive, massive expertise and work to scale and the planning ahead and being nimble and flexible are benefits of the program, not drawbacks—and anyone who’s looked into it deeply can see that.”
The battle over Preschool for All now moves from Salem back to the county. The Multnomah County Commission has appointed a technical advisory group to weigh in on the Preschool for All “fixes” that the governor and business community leaders are after. There are also plans to pay residents to provide their views on the program as part of a $240,000 information-gathering effort. This summer, the group will review proposals that could range from tax structure changes such as raising the income thresholds (which could potentially reduce revenues) to means-testing eligibility for preschool. Recommendations that could end up hollowing out the program could emerge by the end of August.
County Commissioner Meghan Moyer doesn’t support the move to take a second look at the voter-approved funding mechanism. She contends that objections to the mechanism have originated with a small number of very wealthy individuals nearing retirement. She would prefer to see the county concentrate on attracting professionals and other skilled workers and providing supports for future taxpayers. “Preschool for All has such a superior return on investment compared to retaining the tax revenue of a 75-year-old for another ten years,” she says.
Moyer chalks up the controversy to “a weird time in America.” “The ultra-wealthy think that they should be able to control the government over the views of the majority,” she says. “There is no question that if you put this on the ballot again right now, it would pass—it would absolutely pass.”