Our take on today's issues
CPI BLOG
With Peter Dreier
California is broken — and broke. Its K-12 public schools, roads, levies, aqueducts, parks, and bridges; its health-care system; home health care for the elderly and disabled; and even its once-envied public universities are all crumbling from long-term neglect and underfunding. State employees have been forced to take three unpaid furlough days per month — equal to a 14 percent pay cut.
As large-scale fires become a regular phenomenon in San Diego, we need to test the strength of the umbrella of public institutions providing local fire-fighting resources. Over the past three decades, this protection has been damaged in multiple ways.
First, Proposition 13 halved the collections of property taxes, which most fire districts relied on. No longer able to float general obligation bonds to pay for needed fire facilities, fire agencies had to backfill by cutting service levels. Proposition 13 imposed an insurmountable two-thirds voter requirement for approval of taxes that specifically funded firefighting. This is remarkable since Proposition 13 itself did not meet the two-thirds threshold.
The current economic conditions condensed into the budgetary cloud are brewing one of the darkest storms ever to threaten our city. It is the first time that I have seen revenue from property taxes actually fall. Not just fall in growth, or fall in forecasted percentage increase, or fall in share of revenue, but actually FALL, even when the cost of everything else rises. For a nearly $400 million revenue source for our general fund, a decrease of 2.3 percent is a significant dent in our ability to pay for neighborhood services.
The city attorney’s opinion itself is a legal question mark. His argument is that the majority of an electoral membership, rather than the majority who voted in an election, is required to pass something. If we held our politicians and propositions to that standard, democracy would grind to a halt. The “yes” votes on Prop 13 (People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) constituted only 43% of all registered voters, in an election in which voter turnout was 69%. In the revisionist Goldsmithian logic, Proposition 13 in 1978 that is the root cause of our statewide fiscal distress, never passed.
