A Marion County judge says lawmakers were likely within their rights to speed up a vote on gas tax and fee increases, paving the way for a May vote on the matter.

In an opinion issued Wednesday afternoon, Marion County Senior Judge David Leith ruled a court challenge to Senate Bill 1599 — the bill that moved the gas tax vote from November to May — was unlikely to succeed for a key reason: Oregon’s Constitution specifically grants lawmakers the power to set the dates for ballot measures.

“The Court concludes that Plaintiffs are not likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional challenge to SB 1599,” Leith wrote in an opinion, declining to block Secretary of State Tobias Read from changing the election date.

The move is a blow to Republican lawmakers who insist Democrats overstepped their authority by altering the date of the election on taxes and fees.

Gov. Tina Kotek and Democratic state lawmakers approved those increases last fall, but a grassroots campaign led by Republicans quickly collected around 250,000 signatures — far more than necessary — to give voters the final say on the November 2026 ballot.

Democrats opposed that date and moved the vote to the May primary instead. The lawsuit challenging SB 1599 argued that lawmakers had no right to change the date of an election once voters had already submitted enough signatures to set it for November. They also argued that, by speeding up the date of the decision, Democrats hadn’t given citizens enough time to submit statements for the May voters’ pamphlet.

Leith disagreed on the first point. And while he acknowledged that the sped-up timeline posed challenges for voters’ pamphlet statements, he wrote that it was not enough to block SB 1599.

“The Court finds no violation of free speech rights in this circumstance … because on this record the increased burden appears to fall similarly on those seeking to submit arguments

in favor of or opposed to the referendum,” Leith wrote.

At least one person who faced difficulty in submitting a voters’ pamphlet statement will be able to do so. In a separate case challenging SB 1599, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that the state elections officials must publish the argument of the plaintiff, a 73-year-old person with disabilities who lives in Klamath Falls.

What happens next in the Marion County case is not clear. Julie Parrish, the attorney representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told OPB on Wednesday afternoon that no decisions have been made on appealing the judge’s ruling.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/11/oregon-gas-tax-vote-politics-transportation/