Two city councilors are likely to infuriate a handful of CEOs in their quest to address the city’s perennial budget issues.
District 4 Councilor Mitch Green and District 3 Councilor Angelita Morillo introduced what they call the “Fair Share Tax” on Wednesday, seeking to increase existing business taxes on 405 large corporations—and cut taxes for 18,000 local small businesses.
“The huge corporations targeted by this tax have profited greatly from public investment,” Green said in a September 23 press release. “They use our roads, our water, our power, and our talent pool in order to turn massive profits. It’s time we started making them pay their fair share to close our budget deficit and maintain these shared resources that working class Portlanders rely on.”
The cosponsors say the effort could net an additional $72 million annually, which is nearly half of the 2026-27 fiscal year budget gap Council addressed during contentious meetings earlier this summer.
Additionally, small local businesses would see a reduction in taxes under the proposal by raising the amount a small business can make without paying the tax from $75,000 in sales to $500,000 annually. The cosponsors of the ordinance say that would zero out taxes for 18,000 local businesses with an average savings of $900 per year.
“For too long, Portland’s small businesses and working people have been asked to carry more while mega-corporations benefit from the services, infrastructure, and workforce our city provides,” Morillo said in a press release Wednesday.
Under the Fair Share Tax, large corporations’ taxes would increase based on the ratio of CEO to median worker pay. The city already has a formula for a CEO surtax that collects from companies whose top executives earn 100 times the median pay of workers at that company—the Business License Tax—and the new proposal looks to increase the amount publicly traded companies are subject to. The surtax only applies to publicly traded companies that do business in Oregon, including parent companies. Those companies are required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and part of that requirement is a disclosure on CEO-to-worker pay rates.
“If food carts, corner shops, and local entrepreneurs are expected to support our city, the wealthiest corporations should do their part, too,” Morillo said.
The idea isn’t novel. It’s unclear whether it will garner sufficient support in Council, but District 3 Councilor Steve Novick first introduced a tax tied to executive pay in 2016 when he was a city commissioner. The “first-in-the-nation” legislation took effect in 2017.
Novick told the Mercury Wednesday that he likes the idea but is concerned about an “anti-tax mood” after San Francisco recently failed to pass a similar surcharge. San Francisco passed an “Overpaid CEO Tax” in November 2020 that imposed a surcharge on companies whose CEOs earned 100 times the median worker pay or more. But voters rejected a ballot measure that sought to raise the rates in June 2026 after the city’s chief economist, its chamber of commerce and other business groups warned against its passage.
Novick added that the Portland Metro Chamber last year threatened to sue the city if the Council enacted any tax, arguing that the Council doesn’t have the authority to do so. He’d like to avoid that by developing an idea the Metro Chamber would buy into, with specifics about what the money would pay for.
“I’m flattered that they’re copying my idea, and obviously I rather like this method of taxation,” Novick said. “My thinking is that before we go ahead with any major tax increase, we need to build a broad coalition with agreement on what exactly the money would be spent on.”
The Metro Chamber’s membership includes many of the largest companies that operate in the city, including Adidas, Nike, Chevron, PepsiCo, 7-Eleven and many other mega-corporations.
Currently, if the pay ratio is equal to or above 100:1, the company pays an extra 10 percent in their Business License Tax liability. If the ratio is at above 250:1, they pay an additional 25 percent.
That’s what the ordinance’s cosponsors want to change. Their proposal would bump up the surtax on executives in the 50:1 to 75:1 bracket by an additional 25 percent of the liability. The progressive tax would then increase the 100:1 to 250:1 by 50 percent, 250:1 to 500:1 by 250 percent, and over 500:1 by 500 percent of its tax liability. In other words, mega-corporations would pay an additional 25 to 500 percent of the business tax when CEOs are paid 50 to 500 times more than their median workers.
“Inequality is out of control in this country,” Green said. “Thanks to President Donald Trump’s tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, we’ve taken a hit locally, and we have to fight back. The Fair Share Tax does that. We can’t just sit by and allow public services to be hollowed out while the largest corporations continue to add more to their obscene fortunes.”
