Multnomah County, Oregon property tax

ACS 5-year median real estate taxes paid (table B25103) divided by ACS 5-year median value of owner-occupied housing units (table B25077), county-wide. This is a ratio of two independently estimated medians — not the median of the ratio, and not a rate any parcel is billed. It reflects the actual mix of overlapping districts, exemptions and assessment caps as experienced by owner-occupants, and it lags: a 5-year sample centres about two and a half years before its end date.

Layer 1 of the county property-tax corpus: a MEASURED baseline from ACS 2020-2024 5-year, not a published rate. No statutory rate, assessment ratio or exemption has been collected for these counties yet, so nothing here should be read as what a particular property would be billed.

THE SCHEMA QUESTION. ValuationBasis has three members, and Measure 50 matches none of them exactly. `market` (current market value, revalued on a cycle) is false where it counts: statewide FY2025-26 AV is $575.2bn against $1,071.8bn of RMV (DOR Exhibit 1a), and Multnomah's net assessed value is about 49% of its Measure 5 value (Detail Table 1.6). A consumer reading `market` would apply AV-based rates to market value and roughly double a Portland bill. `use-value-eligible` describes farmland only. `acquisition` is the closest honest member, because Oregon's taxed base is held apart from market and drifts by a capped factor. That is the "base, not the rate, is held down" effect the type describes, and the reason Oregon's rate per $1,000 of AV is about double its rate per $1,000 of RMV. Where `acquisition` misleads, other fields carry the correction. (1) A sale does not reset MAV. A buyer inherits the seller's MAV, so the assessment-growth cap says `resetsOnSale: false`. The same choice was made for Arizona's Prop 117, which has the same lesser-of structure. (2) The base was never an acquisition price. It is 1995-96 RMV less 10% (Art. XI §11(1)(a)), and each later addition enters at RMV times the changed property ratio (CPR). (3) MAV does not simply compound by 3%. ORS 308.146(1) makes it the greater of 103% of the prior year's ASSESSED value and 100% of the prior MAV. While RMV is below MAV, AV equals RMV and MAV stops growing until 103% of AV overtakes it. DOR's own summary ("no more than 103 percent of its previous year's MAV") simplifies this. (4) `annualGrowthCap` is the 3% ceiling, not the typical growth: an account's AV can rise more than 3% when there is new construction, a partition, a rezoning, or a recovery from RMV < MAV. THE CPR CANNOT BE EXPRESSED in this schema, and it is the mechanism that most decides an Oregon bill on new construction. Under Art. XI §11(1)(c) and ORS 308.153, new property or a new improvement gets an MAV of its RMV times the class CPR: average MAV over average RMV for unchanged property in the same class, county and year. The ratio is capped at 1.00 and published annually per county in the DOR Supplement. For FY2025-26 in Multnomah it is 0.481 residential, 0.512 commercial and industrial, 0.472 multiple housing, and 1 for personal property, machinery and equipment, and DOR-appraised industrial. It is not an assessment ratio: once the property is on the roll, the 3% rule takes over. It belongs on a county record. Minor construction under $18,200 a year or $45,000 over five years is excluded (ORS 308.149(5)). Those amounts are CPI-indexed for assessment years from 2025 by 2023 c.432. DOR's rule (OAR 150-308-0160(2)) divides the prior calendar year's West-region CPI by the 2024 average, so the factor for assessment year 2025 is 1 and $18,200 and $45,000 stand. DOR's explainer still prints those two figures. MEASURE 5 IS RECORDED AS TWO `rate-limit` CAPS ON A `market` BASE, not as a `circuit-breaker-cap`. In substance it is a per-property bill ceiling, closer to Indiana's circuit breaker than to North Carolina's rate cap. But `circuit-breaker-cap` carries only a bare share with no denominator and no note, and the denominator is the most important fact about Measure 5. It is RMV while every rate is on AV. `Rate.base` can say that, and the note can say bonds are excluded and local options compress first. A consumer must not add the two caps into a single 1.5% ceiling either: they are tested separately, and a property can be compressed in one category and not the other. NOT IN THE CAP LIST because they have no single statewide value: each district's PERMANENT RATE LIMIT (Art. XI §11(3)), fixed in 1997 and unchangeable by the district; and LOCAL OPTION levies above it (§11(4)), which need voter approval and last at most five years for operations or ten for capital projects. These are rates and authorities per district, not a levy-growth rule, and they belong on county or district records. Under the rate-based system a new exemption cuts revenue rather than moving the tax onto others (DOR). RELIEF THAT IS NOT AN EXEMPTION: the Senior and Disabled Citizens Property Tax Deferral programs (household income limit $70,000 for FY2025-26 deferrals, DOR) have the state pay the bill and take a lien at 6% simple interest. The bill is deferred, not reduced, so neither program is in `exemptions`. WHY PROVISIONAL. (a) The three exemption amounts are derived by the statutory 103% step from DOR figures for adjacent years, not read from a DOR document for 2025-26; see their notes. (b) The ORS and the Constitution are cited from www.oregonlegislature.gov's enacted text: the 2025 Edition ORS chapters, and Art. XI §11 as created by H.J.R. 85 (1997) with no later amendment shown. Two later sections change how it applies without amending it: §11k (H.J.R. 15, 2008) lifts the §11(8) voter-participation rule for May and November elections, and §11L (H.J.R. 13, 2010) puts capital-cost bonds from 2011 outside §11 and §11b. §11b shows only its 1990 initiative. Every section relied on has its last amendment in 2023 or earlier (308.146: 2015; 308.153: 2015; 308.149: 2023 c.432; 308.250: 2023 c.172; 310.150: 2003; 307.250: 2017; 311.505: 2021), so the 2025 Edition text governed January 1 2025. (c) Two DOR tables in the same FY2025-26 release give different Multnomah averages: Exhibit 6b in the report shows $12.03 per $1,000 of M5V and $23.63 per $1,000 of AV, while Detail Table 1.6 shows $11.74 and $23.76. The arithmetic reconciles them. Exhibit 6b divides $2,497m of tax including urban renewal by $207.6bn M5V and $105.7bn AV; Table 1.6 divides $2,437m excluding urban renewal by the same M5V and by $102.6bn NET assessed value. Neither is wrong, but a county record must say which one it uses. VERIFIER NOTE ON THE SCHEMA QUESTION. `acquisition` was re-examined and kept, as for AZ's Prop 117. Its doc comment says the value drifts "until the property changes hands", so for Oregon it is honest only when read together with `resetsOnSale: false` on the assessment-growth cap. A consumer that reads `valuation` alone will expect a reset on sale that never happens. `market` would be worse: it is the wrong base for every rate. The real fix is a member for a capped base with no acquisition event, which would also fit AZ.