Oregon lawmakers scrambled Monday morning to address concerns from Google Fiber that a bill - intended in part to help lure the company's superfast Internet service to the Portland area - would instead keep out the service altogether.

State Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, said the current plan is to go ahead and approve Senate Bill 611, which has been in the works since the start of the Legislative session last month. The bill has language that Google Fiber warned Thursday would exclude it from tax savings intended to bring the company's "gigabit" Internet service to Portland.

After that bill passes - either Monday or Tuesday - lawmakers will use a separate bill to fix the faulty wording. That could happen as early as this week.

"The gigabit language is really about a one- or two-word change," said Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, who has shepherded the bill through the Legislature as chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance and Revenue. Another change Google sought can be accomplished almost as easily, he said.

Legislation on tech taxes has been on a torturous path since October, when the state Supreme Court upheld an unusual provision of Oregon tax law. The law values the property of telecom companies and other tech businesses based on the value of "intangibles," such as their brand, in addition to their physical property.

Tech companies testified the thorny tax methodology more than tripled their property tax bills, warning the state law could scuttle large data centers planned for rural Oregon. And public officials said the law and Supreme Court ruling were derailing Google Fiber's plans to serve the Portland area.

But crafting a legislative fix that satisfies both the tech companies and the local governments that depend on property tax revenue has proven difficult. Here's a quick recap:

After a month of hearings,

Oregon cities and counties objected, saying the tax exemptions were too broad. So the state House rewrote the language to narrow the exemptions.

But

For procedural reasons, it would be difficult for lawmakers to amend SB 611 now this late in the process. So Hass said the most straightforward approach to addressing Google's concerns is to start fresh with another bill.

"The House Revenue Committee and I are happy to continue working with Google to try to make sure the definitions and details in SB 611 work for Google and the State of Oregon," Rep. Phil Barnhart, D-Eugene, chairman of the revenue committee, in an e-mail Monday. "We do have another bill that could be used to make changes that may be appropriate."

Google has kept a low public profile throughout the Legislative session, in contrast to Amazon, CenturyLink and Comcast, which all testified on SB 611. But Thursday's letter to lawmakers from the company makes it clear the company has been actively campaigning for the legislation, working behind the scenes.

Given that, it's not clear how communication broke down between the company and lawmakers over language in the bill. Thursday's letter to members of the state House of Representatives went out before Friday afternoon's vote and unambiguously warns that SB 611, as written, would make Google Fiber in Portland "extremely unlikely."

Rep. Tobias Read, D-Beaverton, said the language issues reflect the complexity of the underlying tax issue and the number of parties with a stake in the issue. Read, who serves on the House Revenue committee that worked on SB 611, said each stakeholder sought to fix a separate problem, making the work even more complicated.

"It's not possible in the first attempt to get everything completely right," he said.

Note: This article has been updated to include a comment from Rep. Barnhart.

-- Mike Rogoway

mrogoway@oregonian.com

503-294-7699

@rogoway