Hotel Tax Increase With Wolf Cash Passes Oregon House and Heads to the Senate

Among the most contentious battles in the Oregon Legislature this session is one over a proposed increase in the transient lodging tax.

House Bill 4134 would push the tax on hotels, Airbnbs and other short-term lodgings from 1.5% to 2.75% in order to raise money for Oregon wildlife, which draws tourists and, according to backers, should be protected with tourism dollars.

The bill has perks aimed at getting rural votes, including money for Oregon’s Wolf Management Compensation and Proactive Trust Fund, which, among other things, compensates ranchers for stock taken by wolves and pays for “nonlethal wolf deterrence techniques designed to discourage wolf depredation of livestock.”

HB 4134-A passed the Oregon House and is headed to the Senate. Business interests hope to head it off, arguing that Oregon is in no shape to put up barriers to tourism. Visitors still shun the state after COVID-19 and the 2020 riots downtown, they say.

“At a time when Portland is actively working to rebuild its image and competitiveness, we should not set new policies that deter business and visitation,” Marie Browne, general manager at the Ritz-Carlton, said in written testimony.

The fight got hot after the Oregon Conservation Network published a two-page flyer describing “common misconceptions” about the bill promulgated by opponents. Among them: Increasing the tax would deter tourists from coming to the Beaver State, and Portland tourism needs more time to recover from the pandemic. Both, and more, are false, the flyer says.

The Portland Metro Chamber responded with a 16-page memo dissecting what it called “a poorly researched, factually incorrect and misleading document.”

The OCN flyer “takes such extreme liberties with the facts that its authors must have been counting on legislators not following or reading most of the links, which often stated the exact opposite of what the authors claimed,” the chamber wrote.

OCN’s flyer likely relied on AI-generated content, the chamber said, and contained “no objective research or verifiable third-party data.”

Case in point, the chamber says, OCN asserts that tourist volume increased in Montana after the state increased its transient lodging tax by 1% in 2020. But the footnote for that claim is a news story that says while lodging tax revenues increased, visitor numbers held steady at 12 million a year. A similar assertion about Vermont neglected to say that a 3% tax increase there in 2024 applied only to short-term rentals, not hotels, the chamber says.

Another problem, according to the chamber: Legislators are using outdated data to assess the economic impact of HB 4134-A.

In an email responding to a request for information from Sen. Mark Meek (D-Gladstone), obtained by WW, Travel Oregon staffer Kate Baumgartner said her agency had provided “feedback that the increased tax on lodging could negatively impact demand” and that assumptions in the revenue impact statement “are not aligned with current market dynamics.”

A spokeswoman for the Oregon Conservation Network, a coalition of 40 organizations, didn’t return an email seeking comment. Nor did Legislative Revenue Officer Chris Allanach.