By Naomi Inman
The final signatures were plunked down on December 30—down on the Secretary of State’s desk. It was a slam dunk for the Oregon System.
In less than 50 days, a quarter-million Oregon voters lined up in every county to sign the “Stop the Gas Tax” petition (2025-302) and refer Governor Tina Kotek’s $4.3 billion hike on gas, wages, and transportation (HB 3991) to the voters in November 2026.
For weeks, we watched 250,000 voters participate in the “Oregon System,” a form of direct democracy established in 1902, giving voters the right to challenge laws passed by the legislature. Since then, Oregon voters have voted on nearly 70 veto referendums and repealed 42 targeted laws.
Nick Stark, executive director of the Oregon Freedom Coalition, told Cascade, “The chief petitioners turned in nearly enough signatures to qualify for a constitutional referendum—a very high bar. Although it isn’t a constitutional referendum this time, these numbers signal we are capable of qualifying for constitutional amendments in the future.”
The record-breaking signature drive was a shrill signal to legislators that Oregon’s voters are up for any future challenge—especially any challenges during the five-week session beginning in February.
Today, on January 7, Governor Tina Kotek called for lawmakers to “redirect, repeal, and rebuild” the beleaguered transportation bill, which would have made a poor running mate in November. She gave Republican leaders a backhanded compliment in her speech to the Oregon Transportation Forum by admitting that, “thousands of Oregonians across the state have made their point, and we need to move in a new direction.” As designed, the Oregon System earned the Governor’s attention.
On the heels of her announcement, Stark responded, “The governor’s announcement is an admission of failure on their part. A full repeal is not the best answer. It would gut the good parts of the bill, re-institute tolling, and take out the audit of ODOT. It is now incumbent on the majority to come to the table and negotiate.”
The Governor and her supermajority are back to where they started one year ago, unable to govern and unable to carry out government’s most basic functions: to maintain roads, bridges, and highways, to fix potholes and de-ice the streets. It’s the stuff all of us need and care about.
For decades now, Oregon has given Kotek and her predecessors everything she wanted—all the votes and all the money. Yet the lack of imagination in spending solutions and the narrow fixation on collecting more taxes result in a mindset where nothing can be done unless voters pay more for less—more for gas taxes, more for fees, more for dying transit, and more for fewer roads and fewer lanes for cars in the name of “multi-modal transportation.”
While New York City’s newly elected socialist mayor, Zoran Mamdani, touts the “warmth of collectivist action”—taxpayers in Oregon were nearly condemned to the bitter cold gulag of never-ending tax increases and service decreases. Until a quarter-million voters decided to light a fire, ignited by the spark of individual freedom and democracy.
Naomi Inman is External Relations Manager at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. As a staff journalist and writer, Naomi helps Cascade make the case for free-market policies through media affairs and publications.
