The laws concerning placing tax propositions on the ballot in California are complex. The original idea stemmed from California’s ballot proposition 13, in June, 1978, when voters approved establishing a 2/3 majority for tax increases. This, however, severely prevented jurisdictions from raising the property taxes they had long depended on, and so legislators immediately began looking for ways to get around Prop 13.
Of utmost importance to politicians looking to raise revenues was Article XIII C of the California Constitution, which required a super-majority of two-thirds of the votes “to impose, extend, or increase any special tax.” That limit should have reinforced Prop 13’s original intent, but legislators were careful to make sure that XIII C also included language that permitted Prop 13 “the use of the initiative to affect local taxes, assessments, fees, and charges.” Therein led to a multi-year quarrel, mostly between Democrats and Republicans, over what constituted “local taxes, assessments, fees and charges.” Was a parcel tax a “special fee,” meaning it would require two-thirds of voters to approve it on a ballot proposition, or was an “increase in general taxes,” which required only a simple majority (i.e., 50% plus one vote)?
The question was much debated and caused much confusion. It came to a flash point in Alameda County in November, 2018, when a special measure, Measure AA, was put on the ballot to impose a $198 annual parcel tax for education. The measure passed by a healthy margin of 62%, but that was still short of Article XIII C’s requirement of two-thirds. That should have been the end of that, but the Oakland City Council decided to consider Measure AA as officially passed anyway. By February, 2019, a group of homeowners sued the county, arguing that certification of Measure AA was illegal. The case ended up in the hands of San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman, who in July 2019 ruled that Measure AA was in fact legal because “the two-thirds supermajority vote requirement for local special taxes in California applies to tax measures referred to the ballot by lawmakers but not to citizen initiatives.” Measure AA, by Schulman’s thinking, was a “citizen initiative” because it had been put on the ballot by ordinary citizens soliciting signatures on ballots, and not through an act of government such as legislation passed by a City Council.
In retrospect Schulman’s ruling was nearly as damaging as the U.S. Supreme County’s decision in Citizen’s United. Both wreaked havoc on elections, ensuring that the wealthiest pockets can buy elections. This country is going to have to have a reckoning about Citizen’s United, and we in the Bay Area are going to have to have a reckoning about the “citizen initiative,” which isn’t really a citizen initiative at all, but rather a carefully choreographed piece of political theater whereby the Oakland City Council stages a Kabuki theater with big employee unions like SEIU paying shady third-party firms to hire “volunteer” signature gatherers. These gatherers have nothing in common with actual citizen petition gatherers, who are motivated by ideals. Instead, the hired petition gatherers are often otherwise unemployed young men who make a living traveling from place to place to gather their signatures at about $7 per. “If it’s Tuesday, we must be in Crescent City gathering signatures for building the new library. If it’s Thursday, we must be in Oakland, gathering signatures for the parcel tax increase.” In neither case do the signature gatherers have the least interest in or knowledge of the actual issue. They depend on people’s ignorance and their receptivity to apple pie issues like “Do you think all people deserve housing?”
Now that Measure E has, miraculously it seems, been defeated even here in woke, progressive Oakland, no doubt the tax-and-spend far left politicians are already hard at work trying to figure out how to fleece taxpayers in the future. I don’t pretend to know what they’ll come up with, but I do know they’ll never stop trying to pilfer your money. They don’t care how much they hurt you; all they care about is taking your hard-earned cash and rewarding themselves and their union paymasters. It’s as corrupt as anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to hold someone accountable, email the Mayor and your City Councilperson and tell them they had better remember the lesson of Measure E, if they want to hold on to their job. No new taxes!
Steve Heimoff