A mistake people made about state Rep. Tawna Sanchez, D-Portland, was apparently to take her at her word.

She introduced a bill in 2021, proposing to increase the taxes on beer and cider in Oregon from over $2.60 per barrel to more than $70.

If you think of beer in six-packs, that would be an increase on a six-pack by more than a dollar.

She had plans to grow the tax on wine with that bill, too, from 65 cents per gallon to more than $10. The bill died.

People taking her at her word imagined her as a protagonist for jacking up sin taxes, as a champion for addiction services. Others viewed her as no friend to Oregon businesses small and large trying to be successful with production and sale of alcohol.

Sanchez is now the chair of the state task force looking at alcohol addiction treatment and perhaps raising the taxes on beer, wine and cider to pay for more treatment. She told representatives from the beer, wine and cider industries at a Thursday meeting that it “was never my intention to increase your taxes at the rate that scared the crap out of you, which I will apologize for. But it was really in my opinion the best way to get people to come to the table and have the conversation.”

Fear was her negotiating tool. Fair game, we suppose. It arguably worked. But the Sanchez-of-the-2021-bill lingers over what she does on the task force.

She spoke for more than five minutes at the end of Thursday’s meeting, pushing back on industry concerns, explaining where she is coming from.

One of the points she made was “the beer and wine tax has not been increased in over 40 years, so that’s what I come to address.”

It is a refrain often made about Oregon’s beer and wine tax. A concise statement like that, though, may not be helpful without explanation. Just because a tax has not been increased is not a reason to increase it.

She also aired her concerns — that many share — with imbalances in Oregon’s tax system. “… How do we change Oregon’s structure for the way we do business and how we bring in resources, because we are crazy — the fact that we have the kicker, the fact that we have some of the highest personal income taxes in the country is ridiculous,” Sanchez said. “We have a tax structure that does not work in this state. It works for some people. And not the rest of us, who are doing the work on the ground.”

She tried to reassure industry representatives that she wasn’t out to damage them.

“I have every intention of hearing as many different options as we can to figure out how we do this differently,” she said. “I would say it is not my intention to hurt small business in any way shape or form. My intention is to figure out this piece, because as someone who has worked in the fields of addiction and given services and recognizing how difficult a place we are in this state and in this country with regard to addictions — it’s huge.”

Sanchez is a licensed social worker. She has said she is in recovery. Those are just two of many reasons she is a valuable advocate for the Legislature to have. But it’s been challenging for Sanchez to argue she has been miscast when it was her own actions that led people to it.