Two years after businesses spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat a corporate tax measure, they are pouring money into qualifying their own initiatives for the November ballot.

Grocery companies have raised and spent more than $2 million over the last year on paid signature gatherers, advertising and other costs to advance a proposal that would ban taxes and fees on sales of food, Initiative Petition 37.

Meanwhile, a broader group of businesses is coalescing around a proposal that would make it more difficult for lawmakers to raise revenue through taxes and fees. Supporters of Initiative Proposal 31 have raised and spent nearly $400,000 as of Monday, according to state campaign finance records.

The spending suggests businesses are serious about getting both proposals before voters in the general election and are willing to sink a large amount of cash into winning the campaigns.

Derrick DeGroot, one of the tax initiative's petitioners, is a full-time county commissioner in Klamath County who said he learned of the initiative effort "through connections in Salem." He said broadening Oregon's existing requirement for a three-fifths supermajority vote to raise revenue would force lawmakers to work "in a bipartisan way."

As an example of the need for change, DeGroot pointed to legislation passed earlier this year to increase real estate recording fees to fund affordable housing. In reality, lawmakers from both parties supported House Bill 4007, which also created tax sheltered savings accounts for first-time homebuyers, a priority for the real estate industry.

Both business-backed initiatives would amend the state Constitution, supporters therefore need to submit 117,578 valid signatures by July 6. Monday was this month's deadline for campaigns using paid circulators to submit their latest batch of signatures.

Unions are pumping money into the effort to get their corporate transparency measure on the November ballot. The advocacy group Our Oregon and an associated political action committee, both largely funded by unions, have spent more than $300,000 to qualify Initiative Petition 25 for the ballot. It would require publicly traded companies and their subsidiaries to report their federal and Oregon taxable income, tax liability, sales and other information in public filings with Secretary of State's office. Supporters have until July 6 to submit 88,184 valid signatures.

Joe Baessler, political director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said that pushing for companies to disclose their income and taxes was the logical next step after voters rejected Measure 97, the corporate tax initiative, two years ago.

"One of the things we learned during the 97 fight was there's a lot of ambiguity about how much corporations are actually paying in the state of Oregon," Baessler said. "They make the argument, 'we're taxed so much.'" But it's nearly impossible for people other than state Department of Revenue employees to know how much individual companies pay, he said.

The largest contributors to the grocery initiative are Kroger – the owner of Fred Meyer and QFC -- and Albertsons Safeway; each has spent $600,000 so far. Costco chipped in more than $500,000, according to campaign finance records.

Ron Brake, a chief petitioner on the initiative who has a long career in the grocery business, did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, so it was unclear why supporters want the prohibition against taxes on food to be retroactive to October 2017. It would prevent lawmakers and local officials from adopting not only sales taxes, but also other types of taxes such as gross receipts taxes that governments can charge based on companies' total sales. Measure 97 was a gross receipts tax, and Democrats in the Legislature proposed a smaller gross receipts tax last year.

Initiative Petition 37 would still allow state and local governments to pass taxes on sales of alcohol, marijuana and tobacco products.

-- Hillary Borrud