There was a lot of misleading information circulating on my previous post from people confidently on the Vote Yes side:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eugene/s/TeqoPzeYCE
THIS IS NOT A “VOTE NO” POST. I DON’T ENDORSE EITHER SIDE. THIS IS AN ATTEMPT TO ADDRESS VOTE-YES IMPLICATIONS THAT EVEN ITS OWN PETITIONERS SEEM TO HAVE WRONG.
If I have something wrong here, please correct it instead of just saying, “that’s wrong!”. You owe it to voters trying to navigate the measure.
“Just read the pamphlet and let people make up their own mind”.
I’d love for that to be enough. But the measure doesn’t say “groceries are exempt”. It says “food as defined in 7 U.S.C. 2012(k).” Measures are written by people with lawyers, staff, and time that most working people do not have access to. The voters’ pamphlet doesn’t make clear who funded either side, and petitioners have been oversimplifying crucial details in their favor by saying things like, “groceries are exempt”.
“Aren’t groceries exempt?”
Partly. The legal definition is SNAP’s definition of food, which is broader and narrower than “basic groceries”:
• Exempt: produce, meat, dairy, bread, and also soda, candy, and chips.
• Not exempt: hot deli food and rotisserie chicken, beer and wine, pet food, vitamins and supplements, cleaning supplies, paper goods, and household goods.
Medicine, health care, and residential garbage service are also exempt (Sec. 5(2)). So a can of soda is exempt, but dog food, toilet paper, and a hot meal from the deli are not.
“Isn’t WinCo exempt because it’s a co-op?”
No. WinCo is majority employee-owned through an ESOP, which is probably where the confusion comes from. Legally, though, it’s WinCo Foods, LLC, a Delaware LLC, per Oregon’s business registry. The measure excludes co-ops, credit unions, utilities, and contractors (Sec. 3(10)(c)). WinCo isn’t any of those; it has billions in annual sales and clears the $500K Eugene threshold.
What actually happened in Portland, and the “settled case law” claim.
When Portland’s clean energy surcharge took effect, WinCo and Safeway added a 1% charge to non-grocery items at the register. Shoppers sued.
• Safeway charged it from 2019 to 2020 and settled in 2023 for $8.75M.
• WinCo settled in 2024 for $3.6M.
• Refunds were up to about $200 a person, years later, and only if you heard about it and filed a claim.
That isn’t case law. Both companies settled, admitted nothing, and no court ever ruled on the merits. The lawsuits were about the shelf price not matching the register price, not about passing the cost on, which is legal. Portland’s own rule (LIC-5.08) says listing the surcharge on your receipt is optional. So “it doesn’t show up on receipts anymore” doesn’t mean “it wasn’t passed on.” It can simply be built into the shelf price, where it’s way harder to detect. There has not been a single study on this.
Who’s funding YES?
The largest backer of the Yes campaign is Breach Collective, which gave about $139K in cash and staff time. Its staff organizer is also a chief petitioner. Breach’s 990 marks its donor list RESTRICTED, so I worked backward from the foundations that report grants to Breach:
• Schmidt Family Foundation, from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a California billionaire worth about $38B: about $731K from 2020 to 2023, for “encouraging a just transition away from fossil fuels.”
• Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (New York): $110K. RPA manages grants for wealthy clients, so the original donor isn’t public.
• The Preston-Werner Revocable Trust (Palo Alto, tied to GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner) gave $25K directly to the measure’s petition committee, and funded Breach prior to that ($100k) through his 128 Collective Foundation.
To be clear, Schmidt and Rockefeller didn’t give to the campaign directly, and those grants came before this measure. But money is money. They fund the organization that is running it.
Final word:
Climate action matters, and big retailers paying their share is not an unreasonable idea. But a measure backed by out-of-state billionaire money is being sold as “corporations pay, not you”, and that’s a brutally oversimplified and misleading. Meanwhile, the stores it targets are where working families and SNAP households do most of their shopping, and we’ve already watched those stores pass a nearly identical fee on in Portland. None of that is explained in the pamphlet. That’s politics as usual, and it’s a real bummer.
