The technical glitch that snarled last week’s arts tax payment deadline has been fixed, the city just reported, and the deadline for paying the arts tax (remember, $35 for most income earners) has now been extended to June 10.
That’s almost two months, let’s note, after the original April 15 deadline.
It’s been a long couple of days, so I’ll be pasting in the press release that everyone else will mostly just be rewriting anyway. Just remember two things: Monday, June 10. And www.PortlandOregon.gov/artstax.
Oh, and the city told me last week that it’s unclear how all this is affecting the cap on how much revenue can be devoted to administrative costs.
On May 15, 2013, the City’s website experienced a problem related to the overwhelming response of Portlanders paying their Arts Tax on the deadline. As a result, people were not able to pay their tax late that afternoon and evening.
To prevent the online payment system from overloading, City technical personnel implemented measures to limit the number of concurrent filers on the site at any one time.
These new measures will monitor payment processing capacity. If higher than manageable capacity is reached, then users will get a message asking them to submit their payment in a few minutes. This message will come up when the user selects the button to submit the payment. Users have the option to wait a few minutes and try again or send in their payment by mail. Having this system in place will ensure that usage does not exceed the system capacity and allow payments to continue to be processed online.
Technical staff are also working on increasing the overall capacity of the payment site.
City staff are validating payments that happened on Wednesday, May 15 when the system became overloaded. If there are discrepancies, filers will be contacted and adjustments made as necessary.
Say what you will about the Arts Tax, at least it was passed by the voters and not decreed by the city council after hush-hush backroom lobbying. (So let’s pay it, until it’s repealed or declared invalid…it’s just cricket.)
Nah, because I can only imagine that they’ll do just as poorly when they need to refund my $35 a few months down the road.
Any word on how Bojack’s court case is going?
Do they accept Oregon Trail cards? Because that’s all I’ve got to pay the damn thing. I make $500 dollars a year over the poverty line. Who voted this crap in?? Wasn’t me. One of the reasons I chose not to have children was I felt that I didn’t have sufficient financial resources to support them, now I’ve got to pay for someone else’s kids art class. A real artist doesn’t need classes. You’ve either got it or you don’t. The schools don’t even teach the basics anymore! This is BS! What’s next after this one!?
I love how the Mercury isn’t concerned with what the funds will be used for, or how poorly the tax it was implemented. Nah, it’s far easier to write a blog post saying “Pay up! Here’s another due date!”
Bravo! Some award-worthy alt-journalism happening here.
Wait, I actually have to pay this thing? I hate financially rewarding incompetence.
How is it unclear about the cost? The city code has a bright line hard cap at $500,000 for first year start up costs. Its either under the cap, at the cap or over the cap. According to this from March, the changes back then were already projected to jump the start up costs over the cap, but as far as I can tell from the city code, the cap is still at $500,000.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.s…
It is my understanding that the lawsuit filed to challenge this silly tax was filed in the wrong venue to fight it.
People down at City Hall think this is just a joke, unfortunetly, and will have our monies after all.
Denis, have you heard anything of this?