Oregon's public colleges turned to the task of planning for a new round of budget cuts and tuition increases on Wednesday, in response to the rejection by state voters of a proposed temporary tax increase to finance higher education and other services.

The results of a special, mail-ballot referendum, tallied Tuesday night, showed that a solid majority of Oregon voters -- about 59 percent -- opposed a proposal to increase income taxes temporarily to help remedy the state's budget crisis.

The proposal, known as Measure 30, would have raised $800-million for public education and other services in the remainder of the state's 2003-5 biennium by increasing personal income taxes by 7 percent, or an average of about $133 per taxpayer, and corporate taxes by 30 percent over the next two years. The state's Republican-dominated House of Representatives and evenly split Senate approved the tax increases in August, but opponents of the plan were able to gather enough signatures on petitions to force a referendum on the matter.

The campaign against Measure 30 was led by Citizens for a Sound Economy, an organization based in Washington, D.C., that helped bring about the overwhelming defeat last September of a ballot proposal to overhaul Alabama's tax system to close a budget deficit and raise funds for merit-based college scholarships (The Chronicle, September 10, 2003).

"Oregon is just the latest example of a national rebellion against higher taxes," Dick Armey, the group's chairman, said on Wednesday. "Elected officials had better listen loud and clear: It is time for government at all levels to live within its means," said Mr. Armey, a former Republican majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Measure 30 was supported by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, and endorsed by many of the state's newspapers. Its defeat came just over a year after Oregon voters soundly rejected a similar income-tax measure, leading to tuition increases of 5.5 percent to 21.2 percent for in-state students at Oregon's seven public universities and an average tuition increase of 12 percent at the state's 17 community colleges (The Chronicle, January 30, 2003).

The rejection of Measure 30 means that the Oregon University System will need to cut about $7.5-million, or 1.1 percent, from its $667-million budget for the 2003-5 biennium, according to a contingency plan that state lawmakers adopted in August in anticipation of a challenge to the proposed tax increase.

The contingency plan requires that all of the money come out of the system's $290-million budget for undergraduate education. That provision means that, unless the university system can persuade lawmakers to revisit their plan, the system's spending on undergraduate programs will need to be reduced by about 2.6 percent.

Tom Anderes, the system's senior vice chancellor for finance and administration, said the state's public universities are considering tuition increases or surcharges for the coming academic year ranging from 2 percent to 9 percent, and also are making plans to tap into their reserves and to eliminate or shrink academic programs. Noting that the system's budget was slashed by 9 percent in the previous biennium, and by about 11 percent in the first year of the current one, he said that the additional 1.1-percent reduction would not represent a major shock so much as a worsening of past damage.

"It is the accumulation that is a problem with us," he said.

In a letter sent to budget officials last month, before Measure 30's defeat, Mr. Anderes noted that the university system was receiving about as much state support as it had in 1991, even though it had added 20,000 students since then. The share of state tax dollars going to the university system had fallen from 12.2 percent in 1990 to 6.1 percent in the 2003-5 biennium.

For community colleges, the defeat of Measure 30 will mean a reduction in state funds of at least $6.8-million, or 3.2 percent, according to Camille Preus-Braly, commissioner of Oregon's Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development. Community college officials have yet to decide formally how they will respond to the budget cuts, but they are talking about eliminating some technical-training and academic programs and curtailing student services such as counseling and tutoring, Ms. Preus-Braly said.