CenturyLink files legal complaint against Portland to halt rise in ...

CenturyLink phone service provider is seeking a court injunction to stop the City of Portland from raising its land-line phone tax.

In a lawsuit filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court on Friday, the company's lawyers argue that the added tax undermines its ability to compete with other telecommunication providers and violates both state and federal law.

Portland's City Council in late November unanimously voted to extend a tax to all land-line phone companies ? an idea that Mayor Sam Adams pushed to raise millions of dollars a year for federally-mandated police reforms.

As threatened, Qwest Corp., doing business as CenturyLink, filed a lawsuit against the city, to stop the tax increase.The tax increase went into effect Jan. 1.

CenturyLink and Frontier, which have been in Portland longer than other land-line services, were previously taxed 7 percent of the revenue they earned from basic land-line phone service.

Comcast and Integra, which entered the market more recently, have paid 5 percent of their gross revenues to the city, which includes revenue from other land-line phone services such as call waiting, voice mail or caller ID.

Under the new plan, CenturyLink and Frontier were to start paying the city 5 percent of their gross revenues.

The city estimated that the new taxes would generate $3 million to $5 million a year, and correct an inequity in the city's taxing of land-line providers.

Centurylink officials countered that the increased tax is unfair, because it exempts wireless phone carriers. The company's lawyers noted in the suit that wireless phone companies are now the predominant telecommunications service providers in the state, with 3.4 million subscribers, compared to 949,000 land-line subscribers.

"The Amendments will also have a direct and disproportionate impact on CenturyLink's customers ? many of whom are seniors ? by essentially singling them out to pay the entire cost of remedial measures for City-wide police misconduct," wrote Stoel Rives lawyers Per A. Ramfjord, Robert T. Manicke and Theodore B. Blank.

In November, then-Mayor Sam Adams and Mary Beth Henry, manager of the city's Office for Community Technology, said they were confident the increased city tax would prevail against any legal challenge. They pointed to an Oregon Supreme Court ruling that upheld changes that Eugene made to telecommunication companies' fees in 1997.

Maxine Bernstein;

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/01/centurylink_files_legal_compla.html

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