Colin Woolston is driving the streets of West Eugene, on the lookout for a stolen PT Cruiser. Yesterday, he trapped and transported several cats to the animal shelter.
“There is no typical day, I can say that,” he said.
Woolston is a Community Service Officer Supervisor with the Eugene Police Department. He carries pepper spray instead of a gun, and has a dog carrier in the back of his vehicle instead of a caged back seat.
The majority of community service officer positions are funded by the payroll tax.
Woolston said his program, which is on track to be fully staffed by this spring, has freed up patrol officers to focus on emergencies, and violent crimes.
“Your mail got stolen, you got scammed,” he said, “you lost a bunch of money, those kind of calls take some pretty meticulous time consuming follow up, and patrol officers just aren't able to do that. They don't have the time.”
The tax, officially known as the "Community Safety Payroll Tax," was first collected in January 2021. It was approved two years earlier by the Eugene city council to shore up the city’s struggling criminal justice system.
When it was passed, some opponents argued that the tax placed too much of a burden on middle and low income workers. They wanted upper income earners to pay a higher percentage. Others criticized how much of the funding supported policing.
Twylla Miller, Eugene’s Finance Director, said the tax is paid by nearly everyone who works in the city of Eugene and by businesses in city limits, Minimum wage workers, as well as people who are employed by the federal or state government, are also exempt from the tax.
"Last June, the average wage was just over $27 an hour or about $56,000 for a year,” Miller said. “(For the) average earner in Eugene, the impact is about $247 per a year."
Last fiscal year the city collected nearly $22 million from the tax. It also had some holdover from previous years, when it struggled to roll out programs during the pandemic.
Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said that holdover has helped launch some initiatives that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, such as a new space for community court. She said that put the city in a strong position to win a grant to offer shelter and a caseworker to people cited repeatedly for the same low-level crimes.
“We've been able to make those investments in an incremental way year after year because of this funding,” she said.
A charter amendment that was passed the same year as the tax limits the city to spending the money on public safety issues.
Current and potential future uses
This year’s budget shows about $13.8 million of payroll tax revenue was dedicated to police. Of that, the largest share of funding goes to patrol and community service officers, with funding also set aside for 911 and other programs, such as CAHOOTS.
Courts and the city prosecutor received about $3.8 million, fire and EMS received about $2.8 million and homeless services received a little over $1.6 million according to the most recent payroll tax budget.
Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said the city is discussing a few new payroll tax-funded projects in the next several years, including a full-time employee focused on wildfire risk and a police precinct in West Eugene.
"This payroll tax is key to that because there’s not other revenue streams, or at least not a stable revenue stream that's going to keep pace with service needs," Skinner said.
A team of community members audits how the payroll tax is used every year. Their annual reports, and a full breakdown of how the payroll tax is used, is on the Eugene Citizen Advisory Board website.
Many other cities in Oregon do not have a payroll tax. Voters in Salem overwhelmingly rejected a proposal similar to Eugene’s in November.
