It’s been a big week in Oregon’s zombie city of Damascus.

It started Monday when a wonky bill designed to kill the city passed the Oregon Senate.

On Thursday, a new self-appointed City Council passed a $1.7 million budget to begin the great experiment of being a city again.

On Friday, some city residents filed a complaint with the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office to investigate the man who has declared himself mayor.

This “Groundhog Day” dynamic is familiar to many who have watched Damascus implode since it earned cityhood in 2004. Nearly everyone thought the unruly tenure of Oregon’s newest city was over until the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in May that the city hadn’t properly disbanded.

Now residents and politicians across the state are waiting to see how the Legislature -- and probably the courts again -- will solve the unprecedented problem of Oregon’s infamous quote-unquote city.

“As long as I’ve been in the Legislature, we’ve been involved with the city of Damascus,” said Rep. Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland, lamenting this week that lawmakers were once again considering the fate of the city.

The rural Clackamas County community of 10,500 has long been a nightmare of city governance for all sides.

Damascus formed in a burst of optimism, with residents hoping to ward off urban encroachment from Gresham, Sandy and Happy Valley but quickly found the decision didn’t preserve their quiet character.

So they tried twice over four years to end incorporation after finding the city couldn’t pass a comprehensive plan or use the tax money it collected thanks to infighting and uniquely stringent self-imposed public voting requirements.

Finally in 2016, residents thought they had ended the agony, voting 2-to-1 to disincorporate using a law created by the Legislature specifically for them to do so.

But then the Appeals Court threw them back into turmoil when the judges decided the law didn’t actually do what everyone thought it did. Damascus never disincorporated, the judges said, but the court gave no details about what that meant for the city with no charter, no employees, no elected officials and no taxes.

The opinion reignited anger in a community that many said had found peace after more than a decade of bitter discord. It also stirred questions about what will happen to property rights and taxes.

People will likely be waiting for months -- or years -- for an ultimate resolution.

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Jim DeYoung said he doesn’t understand why everyone is dead set against Damascus being a city again.

“We’ve learned our lesson about divisiveness in our community,” DeYoung told the Senate Committee on Rules. “Never again will we allow our disagreements to destroy us.”

Between the time he said this in early June and Thursday, when another legislative committee took up Senate Bill 226, his statement already seemed dated.

DeYoung is the former Damascus city councilor who brought the lawsuit against the disincorporation vote that led to the appellate opinion.

In the past month, he has held three meetings of the City Council – made up of DeYoung, two other former councilors and two newcomers that the three picked to fill out the council.

They meet at Sunnyside Community Church just off the main drag of Damascus because the former City Hall is now a liquor store.

Inside the liquor store in Damascus, home of the city's former City Hall. June 19, 2019 Beth Nakamura/Staff

They found a city manager and city attorney to work for free. They created a budget committee that met for the first time Thursday to propose a $1.7 million budget based on state revenue sharing funds, tobacco and liquor taxes and road improvement funds.

DeYoung has said he wants everyone to unite around the idea of a new future for Damascus and is dismayed that few others are giving the new city governance any validation.

He wrote a 10-point plan to revive the city but can’t find anyone to latch on to it except for a few dozen supporters who show up to the new City Council’s meetings.

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The Clackamas County Board of Commissioners wrote the current bill to re-undo the city.

Chairman Jim Bernard told the Senate that three years ago, the county received $8.5 million in taxpayer money from Damascus as part of its dismantling.

Of that, $2 million was used to move former Damascus employees onto the county payroll and covered law enforcement within the city limits. Another $3 million went to road maintenance and other infrastructure work that had been deferred because Damascus never came up with a plan to run the city after it became one.

The remaining $3.5 million was redistributed to the people who paid it in the first place.

Bernard said the county has no money left from that stash to restart Damascus on a cityhood track and it’s unclear whether the county has a responsibility to pay that money back to the city.

On top of that, more than 1,000 acres of Damascus has been incorporated into neighboring Happy Valley. Again, no one currently knows what that means for what now appears to be an annexation process outside the law.

“The extent to which Damascus has been completely dismantled means it is simply not possible to restore the city to its previous incorporated status,” Bernard said.

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De Young has said that he, in his capacity as mayor, won’t require the new Happy Valley residents to come back into the city.

That’s even though he has personally decided to function on the premise that everything that happened from May 2016, the date of the second disincorporation vote, to the appellate opinion is null.

Former Mayor Diana Helm sees that exception as suspicious.

Helm served as mayor during the year of the disincorporation vote. She helped steward the city to its end and then chose to annex her business and personal property into Happy Valley because she wanted the amenities of a functioning city.

She doesn’t want to restart the City Council, instead preferring for Senate Bill 226 to pass or for a Circuit Court judge to settle the complex issues.

But she also doesn’t appreciate being cut out for what she said is convenience.

For instance, Helm and the former City Council brought the city’s tax rate to zero before disincorporation as a favor to Clackamas County’s tax collection schedule. That’s a problem for the new City Council because the city previously required a public vote to raise taxes – and many might resist raising taxes if they don’t want the city to exist.

But DeYoung said the tax rate isn’t zero because nothing that happened after the disincorporation vote is valid.

By that logic, Helm argued, she never annexed into Happy Valley and she’s still mayor.

Instead, she received a notice from DeYoung in the mail that told her she had voided her term by annexing into Happy Valley.

“I have a Damascus address, I have a Damascus ZIP Code and I live smack dab in the middle of Damascus. I still consider myself very much part of Damascus with the benefits of Happy Valley,” Helm said. “The way they have picked and chosen what works for them, I think is very disingenuous.”

She’s also dismayed watching her community fall back into the verbal brawls and defensive stance that marked the city’s reign.

“I think it has brought up a lot of the same tensions, a lot of the same feelings we had before, which is really unfortunate because, again, the will of the citizens, the will of the voters is being ignored,” Helm said.

So she’s returned to advocating for the city’s dissolution.

Rural beauty in Damascus. June 19, 2019 Beth Nakamura/Staff

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One prong of that fight was to revive the long-dormant pro-disincorporation group, which filed a complaint with the county’s district attorney, claiming DeYoung should be investigated for impersonating a public official.

“We do not take this step lightly or gladly,” resident Chris Hawes, the head of the revived disincorporation movement, wrote in a statement announcing the complaint.

“Damascus has endured enough turmoil. But if our system is to function, we cannot allow people to deceive and confuse an entire community for their own political ends.”

Hawes marks the time since he spent his days obsessed with disincorporation with his own statistics: He has lost 140 pounds and had one heart attack since he last stood at Damascus City Hall in opposition to its cityhood three years ago.

On a recent day, he sat in the Starbucks of the Damascus Safeway – the hub of the community’s social life – and fielded a barrage of texts and calls with updates about the legislative action.

Hawes never wanted the city to form in the first place, but the chaos that ensued has made him even more committed to the cause.

“I don’t want to do this again, but I will,” Hawes said. “I’ve been told I’m terrible at quitting.”

He knows the current bill likely faces a legal challenge. It’s scheduled for a Monday vote in the House Committee on Rules and is expected to pass a House floor vote and head to the governor’s desk.

If challenged, the bill contains a caveat that would send the case straight to the Oregon Supreme Court for a quick decision.

If that doesn’t go in his movement’s favor, Hawes plans to be back at the Legislature to ask lawmakers to try again to create a path to disincorporation.

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The last three years of peace and tranquility in Damascus ended the day Chris Hawes, got a call that the Oregon Court of Appeals. Hawes, pictured, was a leader in the disincorporation campaign. June 19, 2019 Beth Nakamura/Staff

That won’t be easy.

Oregon law requires a majority of all registered voters to vote for disincorporation during a general election. Damascus came with hundreds of votes when they tried in 2013.

The 2016 election had the benefit of a new state law courtesy of the Legislature to allow Damascus to end its cityhood with just a majority of people who voted in the election, which could be held in May. It won in a landslide.

The bill now before the Legislature aims to surgically fix the flaws that the appellate court found in the first one.

Sen. Shemia Fagan, an attorney, wrote both Damascus liberation bills and this second attempt says the Secretary of State can validate the May 2016 election results if conditions that apply only to Damascus are met and the city has fully wound down its operations.

Fagan didn’t return a request for comment.

Another problem is that the Oregon Constitution sets a high bar for the Legislature to undo a city once it is created: “The Legislative Assembly shall not enact, amend or repeal any charter or act of incorporation for any municipality, city or town.”

Meanwhile, some see a race to claim primacy between those who still believe in Damascus and those who want to just be done.

The League of Oregon Cities recognizes Damascus as a member and has billed it for dues. The state Department of Revenue has asked the City Council to certify its ability to legally share in state funds.

But no other government entities so far see the city as anything but a pile of question marks.

Metro, whose regional land use planning process was part of the impetus for the creation of Damascus as a city, supports ending it in favor of Happy Valley’s plans to expand.

That hasn’t dissuaded Tim Ramis, who served as city attorney before the disincorporation, from acting as a pro bono city attorney again.

The new part-time city manager, Richard Carson, is willing to work for free for the time being because he said his ancestor helped survey the Oregon Trail, which ends in Clackamas County.

“So, my working again in Clackamas County is kind of a personal manifest destiny,” Carson wrote in a news release to announce his administration.

Under the proposed budget – based so far on in-theory funding sources – he would be paid $75,000 a year as a consultant city manager and Ramis would be paid $100,000 for his legal services. The City Council has allotted $10,000 total for themselves.

Carson brought fire and brimstone to the Senate hearing earlier this month by calling those in favor of disincorporation “anti-government activists” and has issued statements on Damascus letterhead calling the bill the “municipal euthanization authorization.”

DeYoung, a former seminary professor, has refused to answer questions about his plans for Damascus, but in public has taken a softer tone that likens the city’s plight to Jesus.

“In the history of Oregon, no city has suffered the ill treatment that Damascus has,” DeYoung said. “But we are alive again and never before has a city been resurrected.

“If you proceed to kill us, what does this reveal about your character?” De Young said.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger

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