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Two of the state’s largest counties, Clackamas and Washington, filed a petition today asking the Oregon Court of Appeals to intervene in the allocation of roughly $420 million in Measure 110 funds, mainly from cannabis taxes, to counties.
The complex formula takes into account a variety of factors beyond just population, such as “rurality” and poverty level, resulting in some counties feeling like they’ve been slighted.
“Clackamas County is expected to serve the third-largest county by population in Oregon. Yet, the newly adopted formula puts Clackamas seventh,” the chair of the county’s board, Tootie Smith, wrote in an August letter to the state’s Oversight and Accountability Council, which is allocating the funding.
The agency has declined to give Washington County a copy of the spreadsheet “in a format that would show the equations actually used in the formula,” the petition says. It also accuses the state of skirting required rulemaking practices, which “has denied the [counties] and others the ability to participate in [a rulemaking] process and have its concerns about inequities in the grant distribution formula heard and possibly addressed,” the petition says.
OHA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The formula, created by the Measure 110 Oversight and Accountability Council, is also being used to distribute funding for new deflection programs.