A state agency has dealt a potentially fatal setback to a push to add Portland’s Eastmoreland neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Oregon State Historic Preservation Office on Wednesday announced that opponents had submitted enough objections to prevent listing the proposed Eastmoreland Historic District on the federal register.

The National Park Service will make a final decision, and the federal agency will accept public comments until it issues the decision.

The state office received 5,952 objections, or 82.8 percent of the property owners in the proposed district. According to federal rules, if more than half of the owners in a district submit objections, the property cannot be listed.

The state decision recognized nearly 5,000 legal trusts that were counted as voters. Eastmoreland has approximately 5,000 residents, according to a Portland State University analysis of census data.

Supporters of the bid for historic district status decried the use of trusts in the vote count. Only four properties were the source of the 5,000 trust votes, swaying the result, said Kristiana Nelson, a board member of the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association.

“I’m disappointed and disgusted,” she said. “I think it’s a deeply cynical and deeply unethical move.”

Historic district supporters could potentially adopt the same tactic in a new application to the State Historic Preservation Office, but Nelson said the designation effort may be at an end.

“I’m not sure what the appetite is to continue this work,” she said.

George Beard, another historic district supporter, said counting the trusts violated democratic principles.

“In a country in which the principle and even the court decisions favor the principle of one person, one vote, this is the most outrageous and rigged and contemptuous, undemocratic act I’ve seen in years,” he said. “I’m aghast.”

Opponents “gamed the system to seize thousands of votes that don’t exist,” Beard said.

Yet he couldn’t help but admire the audacity of the trust-splitting maneuver.

“As a Saul Alinsky guerrilla tactic, touché,” he said, referring to the late Chicago political activist. “I don’t respect it, but I get it.”

The neighborhood association began the drive to establish a historic district to slow the pace of demolitions of historic homes, board members said.

“It’s not a remote thing,” said Andy Payne, an Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association board member. “You can see it. You can feel it. You can hear it.”

The application to form a historic district sought to recognize Eastmoreland as a 475-acre residential neighborhood in Southeast Portland. The district would have encompassed about 1,275 single-family homes built primarily from 1910 to 1921, and 1952 to 1961.

The move came amid advancement of Portland’s Residential Infill Project, which would open the door to more duplexes and other building types in neighborhoods including Eastmoreland. Some residents fear it could increase the pace of historic home demolitions in Portland, although city planners say they expect the opposite.

Not everyone backs the drive for preservation in Eastmoreland.

Amy Rosenberg, an Eastmoreland resident who owns a public-relations firm with her husband, Mike, created a podcast after struggling to make up her mind on the issue. She interviewed neighbors on both sides for the podcast, StreetTalk. Eventually, she came to oppose formation of a historic district.

“Change happens; change is good,” Amy Rosenberg said. “Portland is changing; that’s OK. You can’t put a pause on construction and development and think everything will be OK.”

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