The Eugene Fire Fee and the Vote We Could Have Avoided

First and foremost, you should vote in favor of the Eugene fire fee.

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In the November election, your election ballot will likely include a question of whether or not the City of Eugene should begin collecting a monthly “fire fee” from property owners based on their property’s square footage.

You’re about to get a ton of mailers, ads and more about how the City Manager has unchecked power, how the Eugene Chamber of Commerce hates puppies and libraries, and how we have no choice but to initiate this fee.

And it’s true—at this stage, with no alternatives, it’s important that you vote “Yes” to continue funding the many services our City provides.

But there’s more to the story, and you should expect more from your City leaders. City Council had the opportunity to establish this fee and secure funding without a challenging public vote and they decided not to.

How We Got Here

This page does not exist to talk about the merits of the fire fee, but understanding the fee, its mechanics, and the bigger issues crunching Oregon city budgets is important context. Follow the links below for more information.

In the early 1990s, voters in Oregon passed measures 5 & 50, artificially limiting property tax revenue in the state.

Read more here.

Drafting a budget for the 2025-2027 biennium, the City of Eugene budget committee proposed a budget with $11.5 million more in expenditures than revenue.

This is a volunteer committee anyone can put their name in for.

A revenue committee was formed and proposed a “fire fee”.

They considered a lot of things. Here’s the 77-page final report. Various ideas were ruled out because they didn’t generate enough revenue or didn’t generate revenue quickly enough. Learn more about the fire fee here.

This fee was approved by City Council in February 2025.

This after seeing budget cut proposals from the City Manager than included cuts to animal services, parks, the library, pools, homeless services, economic retention, community safety officers, volunteers in policing, etc.

A petition was successfully circulated to force this fee to be approved by Eugene voters.

The effort was and is funded largely by a variety of Eugene business owners with institutional support from the Eugene Chamber of Commerce.

What We Could Have Done Differently

No one wants to cut library hours. No one wants to defund Greenhill. No one wants to defund homeless services or public safety or all the other cuts that have been proposed. And in fact, I don’t think most of the folks asking you to vote no are actually against the concept of a fire fee or anti-revenue. Anyone familiar with the City’s financial situation appreciates the revenue challenges we face and understands that we have a long-term structural problem that will continue to come up, with or without this fee.

But as the fire fee was developed and the ordinance was written, City Council was lobbied to add limits to the fee. Asks included:

1. Put an end date on the fee, requiring voter approval to renew it. Something in the world of 2-4 years, in line with the next budget cycle or the following one, creating an opportunity to get the budget right-side-up in future years.
2. Put limits on how much the fee can be increased. As written, the City Manager can increase the fee 5%, while City Council can vote to increase the fee by any amount.
3. Establish a separate committee or work group to dig deeper into the budget than the budget committee typically does. This group would work on a more prioritized budget and more closely examine spending before asking for additional revenue from the community.

It’s likely that these changes and initiatives would have allowed the fee to move forward without a petition putting it on the ballot. This would have ensured funding for these services through this budget cycle without the uncertainty of a public vote.

The same City Councilors who are now asking you to vote Yes on the fire fee in November, a position I support, could have avoided a vote in the first place.

Now, the future for our budget and the services it funds is uncertain:

• The fire fee will not be enacted in time for the beginning of the 2025 budget cycle and there will be service cuts between July and November, at a minimum.
• If the fire fee does not pass in November, cuts will continue until a different revenue stream is established.
• Primed by a public campaign over revenue, voters may be more likely to also vote not to renew the Community Safety Payroll tax in 2027, eliminating another $25 million from City services budgets.

Negotiating with organized constituencies is part of the job of a city councilor. Councilors who truly care about the potential loss of services should have secured those services when they had the chance rather than roll the dice on a public vote.

So go forth and:

• Ask for more from your City Council. Tell them you don’t appreciate important services being held hostage with compromises on the table.
• Contact your state senator and representative and tell them we need a fix to Measures 5 and 50. Multiple bills this session—HB2321, HB2333, HB2334 and HB2335—seek to establish task forces to formally investigate the impact of these measures on local government funding, historically disadvantaged communities, higher education costs and various taxing districts in the state.

We all live in the same city and want many of the same things for it. We are, more than we realize, on the same team. It’s time we start acting like it.

Further reading:

• Save Our Services, the yes-on-the-fire-fee movement
• Voters Against Forever Fees, the no-on-the-fire-fee movement
• Petitioners challenge Eugene’s new Fire Service fee, KLCC, Feb 26
• Eugene fire fee to appear on November ballot, KLCC, March 25
• We Didn’t Fund the Fire, Eugene Weekly, March 4
• Eugene fire service fee could head to 2025 ballot after petition drive succeeds, Register-Guard, March 25
• Eugene approves fire service fee: What it means for residents’ monthly bills, Register-Guard, Feb 11