Oregon Public Broadcasting

26,000 voters in central Oregon voted 'yes' to raise property taxes to pay for an expansion of the local college.

But the college bond passed this year only because Oregon voters changed state law last year.

Ethan Lindsey reports.

Not even half of the registered voters in Central Oregon Community College's district actually voted in this election.

Supporters weren't bothered by that – almost 54 percent of voters approved the bond.

Nancy Blankenship: "If the double majority would have applied than this ballot measure would have failed."

Nancy Blankenship is the Deschutes County Clerk.

Oregon's double majority was the only such law in the country.

But last year, Oregon voters passed Measure 56.

It allowed property tax votes in lower-profile elections to pass without a 'double majority' of ballots.

Steve Buckstein is a senior policy analyst with the conservative-leaning Cascade Policy Institute.

Steve Buckstein: "If you require 50 percent of the voters show up and 50 percent plus one of those can pass a bond measure, that would be basically 25 percent of voters passed something. To me that was a low bar – and now it's even lower."

The COCC vote was one of five property tax measures that passed this year – but would have failed under the earlier law.

A mosquito control district in Clackamas County, a cemetery district in Estacada, a school district in Dallas, and a fire district in Rogue River all will get additional property tax dollars.

Buckstein says it's usually in the interest of tax supporters not to let everybody know about an election.

At the COCC student union, student Josh Budish is celebrating the passage of the school bond.

But he says you could easily find out that the bond was supported by just a subset of the population. All you'd need to do is walk around downtown Bend.

Josh Budish: "And you ran into say 20 people, some of those people are still not going to know what the bond measure is – but they probably voted on the presidential campaign."

Last year, the same voters narrowly defeated a similar college bond – even though turnout was at record levels.