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Oregon’s UI Trust Fund Balance / Taxing Forgiven PPP Loans? / It’s a Warning Week
By Oregon Restaurant Association [6],
It’s a very busy week in the Oregon Legislature. Here are the latest updates overall at the association. A more detailed Advocacy Update will be sent to ORLA members soon from our Director of Government Affairs Greg Astley. As always reach out with any questions or comments.
Oregon’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) Trust Fund Balance
Recently the United States Chamber of Commerce pulled together the fund balances available to every state to pay unemployment insurance benefits. You might be surprised to hear like we were that Oregon has the best funded trust fund in the nation. This isn’t based on population or some per capita assessment. Take a look at the UI Trust Fund Comparison spreadsheet [7]. My favorite new line to use is “After paying out benefits to unemployed Oregonians through all of 2020, Oregon still has more money in our trust fund right now compared to what California had before Covid even started.” So you may ask, why the egregious increase in our tax rates? We have the same question. ORLA, Oregon Business & Industry, NFIB, and other business partners are working together to solve this problem.
Taxing Forgiven PPP Loans?
You heard that right. Some in the Oregon Legislature thought it would be a good idea to tax your PPP funds. Proposed amendments to House Bill 2457 would have amounted to a surprise tax bill on businesses across Oregon. Our friends at OBI and NFIB rallied the business community to quickly respond with this statement [8] once the amendment was posted and a work session on the bill was cancelled this past Tuesday after the coalition submitted the attached opposition letter. We will keep a watchful eye on future attempts such as this before the legislature adjourns at the beginning of Summer.
It’s a Warning Week
While more and more states move to new models of operation of at least 50% capacity statewide for restaurants, Oregon continues to hold on to its county by county risk assessment system. See the latest case counts from Monday’s county by county Oregon Health Authority County Risk Level report [9]. The data that stands out to me in the document is as follows:
- Jackson County was able to keep their indoor dining open this week and next even though their case counts would have moved them back to an indoor dining shutdown. Jackson County was the first ‘extreme risk’ region of the state to benefit from the Governor’s new “2 week buffer” system whereby a county is given 2 more weeks to operate at their current level (Jackson had moved out of Extreme to High) before running the risk of moving back to a more restrictive risk category based on case counts. Jackson County in the attached report appears to be back towards a trajectory of staying at High Risk.
- Josephine County may be the next county to benefit from the “2 week buffer” – numbers there are tracking towards the ‘Extreme’ threshold but indoor dining would stay open even if Movement week data next week has them at an Extreme case count level. That would give Josephine County 2 more weeks to get their case counts down.
- A Tale of 2 Cities? It’s possible in next week’s Movement Week data that the City of Salem will have two different sets of restrictions for restaurants. Polk County (which includes West Salem) is on track to get to 50% capacity while Marion County (the rest of Salem) is on track to stay at 25%.